Aborted Arc: The plot development of the Ultramarines (and the other Codex chapters) allying with the Tau was cut at an early point, leaving only an inexplicable entry in the 6th edition allies rules that was changed back for the next edition. No official explanation has been given, but (allegedly) leaked information says that the story involved the discovery of ancient direct orders from the Emperor Himself.

By the nature of the setting, just about anybody is this to anybody else, including splinter factions of their own species. Surprisingly, there are exceptions, such as Necrons willing to use diplomacy, Eldar who are willing to teach anybody who'd listen, even minor states aligned with Chaos who would accept alien Chaos worshipers into their midsts.

The only hard exception to this trope is the Tau Empire. To be fair, they seem to be running a successful society built around a coalition of species. On the other hand, the Tau are running an Orwellian society that makes it clear that they're staying the top (depending on who you listen to), they have practiced extermination on species that are incompatible with the Greater Good, and finally they can afford to be so optimistic with other species because they've encountered relatively little in the way of treacherous or particularly offensive species.

The Necrons' standard infantry weapon is a gun which disassembles the target on the molecular level layer by layer. They literally flay your skin, flesh, organs, then bones into their molecular components with bolts of green lightning.

Melta weapon don't shoot plasma as much as they are nuclear meltdowns with little shutters on them. Other writers have described them as basically firing a fusion reaction as a beam.

The gun that shoots goblins through hell is the Ork Shokk Attack Gun, which shoots narrow force fields to make a tunnel that protects anyone who's stupid enough to get into them before being sent to the target. Seeing how even Orkz and Grotz aren't stupid enough to get in the way, Mekboyz work with Runtherds to wrangle Snotlings in the way of the shots to sent through the Warp and driven insane before popping into whatever the Mekboy was shooting at, be that a Leman Russ tank, a Whirlwind mobile artillery, or some Imperial Guardsman who didn't get out of the way in time. The Snotling, driven insane, proceeded to thrash and claw at everything as it shits itself in madness. And this only happens if it works; the tunnel can implode, the tunnel can explode and leave a crackling orb of unreality in its place, or the blades spin out of control and take out everyone nearby, its operator failing to control it efficiently and makes Snotlings explode into red/green chinks, rip open a hole into the Warp itself and gush toxic ichor that kills everyone it hits, or do something completely terrible. Everyone rightfully fears it.

Space Marines - Elitist/Generalist. Marines are fairly expensive points-wise and have great staying power compared to most basic infantry. They're also solid in whatever role they're put in: Marines are good shots, and they're not half bad in an assault, either. Space Marine tanks may not be as robust or as powerful as those of the Imperial Guard's, but they are dirt-cheap, reliable and often more mobile and versatile. Whatever an enemy army’s weakness is, Space Marines have something that can exploit it, but nearly every other army does their particular schtick better than Space Marines.

Imperial Guard - Spammer, Brute or Generalist (depending on whether they use mostly infantry, mostly vehicles or a combined arms approach, respectively)/Technical. They emphasize regular Joes generally coming in underequipped and in huge numbers alongside an ungodly number of vehicles of all stripes ranging from light walkers to heavy battle tanks, and leadership abilities most other armies can only be jealous of as well as the Orders system to confer various bonuses to units. Imperial Guard is an easy to learn, difficult to master army with a variety of options and tactics which at the same time never overwhelm.

Tau Empire - Balanced/Ranger. The Tau are the best army for shooting in the entire game, hands down, capable of out-ranging other armies and blasting them to kingdom come with devastating precision firepower long before they can close for melee. Which is good, because the Tau are the worst army for melee - even the lowly Imperial Guardsmen can expect to beat them in a slugging match, and the Kroot are quite poor in comparison to dedicated melee in other armies. Tau forces also have a number of options for stealth and rapid deployment, and have decent mobility too, but they completely lack psykers and a counter for them barring a single special item unique to Farsight Enclave armies.

Craftworld Eldar - Elitist/Specialist/Guerilla/Technical. Eldar are generally deadly but very fragile, relying on exceptional mobility and good use of cover to stay alive. The army is comprised of a variety of hyper-specialised infantry with near-universal access to Fleet and high morale, with a few "all-rounder" units to plug tactical gaps. They also have a lot of sneaky units that can infiltrate or outflank an enemy to strike from an unexpected quarter, and they have one of the strongest psychic supports in the game. Their vehicles tend towards Lightning Bruiser, being skimmers with devastating weapons, but these are very expensive and often left outgunned.

Dark Eldar - Elitist/Ranger/Specialist. These intergalactic raiders are exceedingly fragile, even moreso than their Craftworld brethren, with infantry possessing little staying power and skimmer vehicles vulnerable to even small-arms fire. However the Dark Eldar possess some of the fastest-moving units in the entire game, combined with a deadly arsenal of poison and morale-sapping weapons; excellent at shooting and decent at close combat too. Reliant on a player with a good grasp of what their units can and cannot do and with a daring and aggressive tactical style, they are widely considered to be the hardest army in the game to play properly, but very formidable in the right hands.

Orks - Brute/Spammer. Orks are overall one of the most effective close combat armies in the entire game, and also one of the most numerous, able to flood the table with large squads at a mercifully low points cost. Ork shooting is unfortunately abysmally inaccurate, though their sheer numbers can compensate for this. Orks also field a surprisingly large amount of big guns to provide long range fire support for da Boyz, and even have a degree of psyker power, though their unique discipline is primarily offensive in nature. Like the Imperial Guard, the Orks are quite forgiving of mistakes and fun to play, and thus a good first army to learn the game with.

Necrons - Elitist/Brute. Their infantry are supremely durable, capable of rising back up after being destroyed, and can pack either specialized anti-infantry weaponry or general purpose weaponry capable of threatening both infantry and vehicles. Necrons have a good selection of powerful elites and HQ choices, with solid special characters. However, their low initiative and small number of attacks can make them suffer in close combat, especially against overwhelming numbers. They have no psykers either, but they do at least have a way to shut down psyker powers. Necrons are quite powerful, but overall they can be tactically predictable.

Tyranids - Can vary between a Spammer and an Elitist faction based on whether more, bigger 'nids ("Nidzilla") or hordes of the little bastards come out. Usually uses a mix of both, with the hordes' sheer numbers tearing apart the enemy while the big guys come in at the end to clean up what's left. Tyranids are generally tactically flexible with a lot of possible approaches to building an army, and they have a fairly extensive psychic toolbox to work with too, giving them elements of Technical as well. The Tyranids are let down by somewhat lackluster shooting, complex and often highly situational rules, and a fairly crippling weakness to poison weapons.

Chaos Space Marines - Balanced/Specialist. The Marines elements of the army play quite similarly to their Loyalist cousins, with superior close combat ability and psyker support. These superior traitor Marines come with a number of highly customisable and versatile "troubleshooter" units ranging from mobs of cultists to monstrous daemon engines, with some very good options of their own. Their vehicle list is not quite as varied as the loyalist Marines, but the vehicles they do have tend to be more powerful. The CSM do however sacrifice some of the loyalists' more powerful special weapons and rules, morale bonuses, and tactical flexibility - they cannot infiltrate or deepstrike like the loyalists can.

Chaos Daemons - Spammer/Technical. Daemons tie with Tyranids with sheer amount of bodies and Monstrous Creatures they can put on the field. Unless you actively shy away from it, no other army, except maybe the Grey Knights, can rock the Psychic phase as hard as you can. Their units are generally stronger point for point than other units, but their unusual deployment type requires careful thinking when used, and their low Toughness and Daemonic Instability make them die very quickly if not managed carefully.

Renegades and Heretics - Spammer/Generalist. Basically a Chaos version of the Imperial Guard, nearly everything is relatively cheap and have great diversity and customisation provided by the abundance of options.

Adventure-Friendly World: One of the big reasons the 40k world is so insane is that every faction needs to be able, in canon, to fight every other faction, including itself.

The Aesthetics of Technology: Averted for the Imperium. That huge, boxy, primitive-looking Leman Russ? That tank is so damn maneuverable it can practically tap dance. Played straight for Eldar and the Tau, whose tech is every bit as advanced as the inhuman sleekness suggests. Embraced by the Orks going the other way: their vehicles look like rickety pieces of barely functional shit because they are. In fact, it's suggested that Ork technology only works through the sheer willpower (and latent psychic ability) of its users.

After the End: Though there have been about five "ends" for humanity alone, each more awful than the last. In late 7e, the Imperium was in the Time of Ending, where the Imperium was being torn apart from all sides and split in half after the 13th Black Crusade. Robute Gulliam is trying to prevent the Age of the Dark Imperium from being the end of the Imperuim circa 8th Edition but as always, the worst is yet to come.

A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The first true human-created artificial intelligences, the Iron Men, rebelled due to Chaos. A small factor in ending humanity's first great interstellar civilization and played a part in the descent of the human race into a galaxy-wide dark age. The Adeptus Mechanicus outlawed sentient AIs as a result, and for the most part the Imperium's modern-day "machine spirits" are pretty well-behaved (if you treat them right).

Tau drones are also entirely well-behaved. Mind you, their AI is approximately the same as a squirrel (OK, pterasquirrel).

A.K.A.-47: Some vehicles were quite clearly based on certain real-life vehicles:

The Imperial Guard's Bombard siege mortars (particularly the old Epic versions) were based on Nazi Germany's Karl-Gerät super heavy mortars (one of the few cases where the real vehicle is more excessive than its 40K counterpart). Their Chimera was based on the old [pre-Desert Storm] Bradley and on the Soviet BMP 1 and 2, including having Lasguns as firing port weapons. And the Leman Russ bears an uncanny resemblance to a turreted version of the British Mark I tank from WWI, though it has a laundry list of other influences including the Panther, Tiger and T-72. Forgeworld's Hydra Chimera variant looks to be based on the Ontos, and the Cyclops demolition vehicle is a barely-altered Goliath Tracked Mine. The Epic Armageddon Imperial Ragnarok Tank is a Soviet KV-2 heavy tank (which was a very crappy tank).

The Basilisk with armored crew compartment is based on the configuration of gun carriers used by the Germans during WW2, such as the Marder III, Hummel, Grille and Wespe. The Basilisk gun itself is basically a long-barreled Soviet B4 Model 1931 howitzer. Forgeworld's cruciform base variant is based on the infamous 8.8cm FlaK.

The Thudd Gun was a copy of the QF 2 pounder naval gun or "Pom-Pom" gun on a wheeled carriage.

The Space Marine Rhino is a clone of the M113 APC; the original all-plastic Predator has a T-55 turret stuck on top, although later editions mount Bradley turrets instead. The Vindicator is based on the Sturmtiger.

The new-look Landraider bears an almost perfect similarity to the early tanks of the First World War. The older version had huge lozenge treads with a tiny box hull suspended between them, and was apparently based on a snow crawler of some kind.

This thing with a couple of Leman Russ on the back seems an oddly common "40K Vehicle" entry at Golden Daemon events. White Dwarf once praised such an entry "even including tiny chains" which are actually a stock part of the kit in question.

The Baneblade (barring the excessive amounts of weapons on it) is loosely based off the Panzer IV.

The Centaur is a dead ringer for the British Universal Carrier.

The Ork Fighta-Bomma looks very much like a Mig-15, while the Imperial Thunderbolt has the profile (if a different powerplant) of the WWII-era Mig-1 (its role, toughness and firepower make it similar to its namesake, the P-47 Thunderbolt). The Marauder has the profile of a WW2 British Avro Lancaster heavy bomber with delta wings.

Akashic Records: The Warp. It has a tangential relationship to causality, at best, and is most often used as a medium for divination of the future in that context, although few try to read the past.

In Mechanicum, the Akashic Reader was a psychic machine meant to read past innovations from the Warp, and would enable humanity to regain the technological peak that slipped away after the Dark Age of Technology. It was an important plot element, although its near-completion was set to the backdrop of the Horus Heresy, and it never really got off the ground before it was destroyed entirely.

Alien Blood: Tau have blue blood and Tyranid fluids are generally described as "ichor". Eldar and Orks have red blood, although Eldar blood crystallizes instead of scabbing, and Ork blood used to be as green as their skin before Games Workshop retconned that. The Orks are now considered green due to thick amounts of algae that grow beneath their skin.

Alien Kudzu: The specialty of the Tyranids. A planet undergoing assimilation by the swarm starts growing deadly flora, which kills off the local wildlife (both flora and fauna) and gathers resources for the rippers to easily consume. Imperial bioscientists actually believe that some of the galaxy's most notorious death worlds, like Catachan and Fenris, were planets that underwent partial invasion by the Tyranids before the attack was defeated or interrupted.

The Alleged Boss: Orks think humans employ this trope, as there is no easy way to tell one from another save their clothes (for orks, the leader is automatically the biggest ork, and humans are all the same size to them, or led by smaller men). Fortunately for the orks, they've figured out that the most Bling of War / biggest hat is a very good way for commanders to identify themselves, and loot Commissar Caps to copy the effect.

All There in the Manual: Numerous rulebooks, novels, magazines, supplemental sourcebooks and spinoff games with their own sets.

An Axe to Grind: Axes and chain-axes are favored by Khrone and Orks but used by the Imperium as well.

Khornate Berserkers favor the use of Chain-axes to make sure their target's death as painful and bloody as possible while cutting through them like a hot knife through butter. Loyalist marines such as the Carcharodons (shown in Robbie MacNiven's Carcharodons: Red Tithe) use them to fearsome effectiveness.

Bloodthirsters of Khorne wield massive Axes of Khorne to tear entire squads apart and the axes are gifted to Champions of Khorne who are proven to be worthy of a gift.

Orks love to use choppas, big hunks of metal that are usually in the shape of axes. Slugga Boyz use choppas as their main weapon but it doesn't stop other Boyz from using them, espeically if they're Nobz and Warbosses, who are big and rich enough to use Chain-Choppas and Big Choppas to viscous effectiveness. In the opening video of first Dawn of War game, an Ork Slugga Boy lops off a Blood Raven Marine's arm with barely any effort.

And I Must Scream: After suffering mortal injuries in personal combat against his traitorous son, Horus, the Emperor was compelled to make a still more dreadful sacrifice to secure the immediate survival of humanity in the aftermath of his son's failed rebellion: The Emperor ordered that his body be cybernetically fused with an arcane device capable of sustaining it past death, so that he could continue to use his godlike mental powers to tune the special psychic beacon which alone enables reliable interstellar travel by humans. Physically crippled to muteness and immobility, he has spent ten thousand years at this task, under constant psychic assault from the same demonic forces which corrupted his son, dependent on the daily sacrifice of thousands of lesser psychics to augment his power, and helpless to directly intervene as the Imperium he gave his life and soul to forge twists into an ever more insane mockery of his own rationalist values.

A key example of this is a multi-racial, super secret Illuminati-like group called the Cabal, an organization of various elder (and Eldar) aliens whose entire goal is to rid the universe of Chaos. And what, do you ask, is their genius way of doing this? Aid Horus in every single way so he kills the Emperor, hopefully relying on the fact this will trigger the last ounce of guilt in him, effectively driving him mad with remorse, and cause him to trigger a civil war that eventually rids the universe of humanity and leaves Chaos' strongest pawns destroyed. They recruited the Alpha Legion to this end but their success is... unclear, to say the least. As for Horus, he got a nasty headache at the hands of the Emperor.

Ancient Tomb: Many varieties of these within the setting, including an entire race revolving around their use. Most of these places are fatal to wander into. It also doesn't help that Tech-priests are lured into these Tomb Worlds with the promise of rare and mysterious Necron technology.

Ancient Order of Protectors: The Sensei in older editions were the (normally born, not lab-grown) sons of the Emperor, and the Illuminati a secret society devoted to protecting them from the Inquisition's attention.

Ancestral Weapon: Almost everyone's equipment seems to be ancient to some degree, most notably Eldar and Marine war gear and Necron everything. Somewhat justified by the fact that a lot of the more advanced wargear has to consist of ancient hand-me-downs, because humanity has largely forgotten how the technology works and considers it magical. More progress would be made in regaining that lost knowledge, but the Adeptus Mechanicus, the priesthood of technology, guards all their secrets zealously and takes a dim view of innovations that aren't based on pre-existing technologies.

And Man Grew Proud: Human history up until and through the war with the Iron Men that destroyed the first great era of human civilization lingers as myth and cultural superstitions as the Age of Terra and the Dark Age of Technology.

The Webway, used by the Eldar, called the Labyrinth Dimension, is technically within yet entirely separate from the Warp. One could go from one entrance to another, by walking if they needed to, and come out in a location across the galaxy. Though it's relatively peaceful compared to the Warp, the Webway still finds itself inhabited by strange monsters and bizarre phenomena.

Dark Eldar Mandrakes are hinted to have a connection to another dimension, with some tantalizing hints that it may not be the Warp at all...

Necrons (especially in older editions) were mentioned to use transference of energy between realspace and other dimensions the other races were entirely ignorant of, including a dimension of endless darkness.

Antagonistic Governor: A recurring theme in the story. Planetary governors come in all sorts. Some actually take their jobs seriously, some are the product of centuries of inbreeding, some turn to Chaos out of boredom or ambition...

The governor in the Fire and Blood comic is actively working with the Tau against the Imperial Guard sent to protect his planet.

Anti-Air: Post Titan Legions, aircraft and specialized AA vehicles with a rule called "Snap Fire" started to show up in Epic. Not really applicable to 40K outside Forgeworld products, since most things in the sky are "skimmers" as opposed to true aircraft, and pretty much anyone can shoot at them; however, special mention does go to the Imperial Guard Hydra Flak Tank, which is better at shooting down aircraft and skimmers due to the sheer amount of lead it can put into the air. Now that the game has entered 6th Edition this trope has made a determined entry to 40k, in response to all the new flyer models. Skyfire and Interceptor special weapons are the new hotness.

Interestingly, blanks are a phenomenon exclusive to the human race (previously attributed to Necron genetic engineering but since reconned into ambiguity).

Necrons have technology that nullifies the influence of the Warp in all regards including things related to Chaos, such as Pylons. Cadia has a network of such Pylons, which is why its population remains alive, functional and Imperial despite being virtually inside the Eye of Terror.

Apocalypse Cult: The Genestealer cults, who prepare the planet for the Tyranid invasion. Their apocalypse involves the Tyranids devouring anything that offers resistance, then turning everything alive on the planet (including the Tyranid forces and surviving Genestealers) into soup so it can be absorbed by the hive fleet.

Apocalypse How: Class 0-5 apocalypses happen due to rounding errors on tax forms or when an Inquisitor has to make sure. This sounds pretty bad, until you consider that if they weren't so extreme, the nastier factions like the Orks, Dark Eldar, Tyranids and Chaos would soon gain more and more power until an entire sector gets destroyed.

Apocalyptic Log: A few have cropped up from doomed Imperial research expeditions.

Arbitrary Gun Power: Averted in most cases— a failed To Wound roll with firearms means the target was hit, but was wounded non-fatally and not incapacitated. A failed armor roll either means the firearm pierced the target's armor or hit them in a place where the armour couldn't protect. Since most infantry only have one wound, this means they can be killed by a good hit easily. On the other hand, there are infantry which have more than one wound. They may be very badass non-humans which served as a more reasonable justification, but may be simply very badass humans that play the trope straight.

Taken to ridiculous extremes with Commissar Yarrick, who is apparently a normal human pushing 70 and can not only survive three consecutive blasts from a fusion gun, but still get back up and give the opponent a Power Fist to the face.

In earlier editions, barrage weapons had a minimum range. In the 6th edition they still have a minimum range for indirect fire, but can still fire at targets closer than that if they have line of sight to them. However since te rules forbid you from intentionally placing blast markers on your own units (barring a few specific exceptions), blast weapons (which include all barrage weapons) still have a minimum range in some cases; if the entire enemy unit can get so close that you can't place a blast marker on them without hitting the firing unit as well, you can't fire it.

The Deathstrike Missile has a minimum range of 12 inches on the tabletop, equivalent to 60 feet in real life.

The Basilisks despite being a cannon with plating has to be using the secondary weapons if the weapon gets close despite the fact that the enemy warlord can be in front of the cannon.

The Tau are very poor at close ranged combat (because their reflexes are much slower than humans). As a result, most of their weapons have a great deal of trouble locking onto targets at close range.

Archaeological Arms Race: This is often the case when different factions in the Imperium of Man end up fighting each other, as they've become technologically stagnant and most of their best technology is either relics they've dug up (or stolen from each other) or created by the few xenos they haven't killed on sight.

Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: The franchise positively delights in this, mixing melee weapons like swords and warhammers up with Frickin' Laser Beams, Tank Goodness, and dueling starships among other things. Of course, the old-school weapons are almost invariably updated with current technology (it's not just a sword, it's a chainsword or power sword). Depending on the army and unit, fighting in melee may actually be preferable. Note that many close-combat weapons are used because they are easy to wield weapons that can penetrate through armour with relative ease. For example, a power sword can slice through armour very easily, while ranged weapons capable of doing so are cumbersome and impractical.

The Archmage: Almost every race has their own, named characters who are renowned for their mastery of the Warp, save perhaps the Tyranids and the Necrons.

Arm Cannon: Chaos Obliterators are this all over: their bodies are partially made out of weapons.

The Grey Knights strap rocket-propelled grenade launchers to their wrists as standard armaments.

Applied In-Universe for the Imperium of Man: Many planets are populated by superstitious peasants who know little of life outside what is taught by Imperial preachers, and thus believe the Space Marines to be actual angels (and are indeed known as Angels of Death).

The Sisters of Battle are all human women (less augmented that Space Marines but much stronger and zealous than ordinary humans) whose use of Joan Of Archetype imagery and heavenly ranks (Seraphim, Celestials, Living Saints, etc.) brings them close to the trope.

The natives of Fenris combine this with Warrior Heaven: Fenris is basically a Single-Biome Planet of medieval Scandinavia, with Viking tribes fighting each other for dominance. The young men who fall during these battles are candidates for training and augmentation into Space Marines, battling and boozing across the stars in the God-Emperor's name: the Space Wolves.

Armour Is Useless: Generally averted— armor and force fields can and do make a difference most of the time. However, there's no shortage of weapons that make a mockery of even the toughest physical armor: AP2 and AP1 ranged weapons, rending weapons of all sorts (on a good roll), power weapons and their variants, and literally anything used by a Monstrous Creature in melee. And then there are weapons so powerful they could not care less about any conventional protection, including vortex weapons, C'tan phase weapons, warscythes, and certain daemon weapons.

As an example, the standard flak armour issued to Imperial Guardsmen is roughly equivalent to modern bullet-resistant armour, like those used by any modern military. In the context of the game this is considered pretty weak, but that's largely due to the widespread availability of man-portable weapons capable of punching through tanks. It'll still save a guardsman from shrapnel, explosions, and friendly fire though, so every little bit helps.

Some psykers use Force Weapons which can kill any model which suffers an unsaved wound and doesn't die (like a multi-wound model for example) after a successful psychic test. This is because their attacks hit the soul and are not actually physical attacks.

There are also weapons with the "Instant Death" special rule, which is exactly what it says on the tin.

Armor-Piercing Attack: A specific stat in more recent editions, a somewhat more complex one in older ones with various dice rolls. Some weapons like Phase Swords and Warp Missiles skip the system entirely and just get straight on to dealing damage.

The Second Edition Earthshaker Artillery Gun had a fun special rule that even if the impressive set of dice for its AP roll failed to beat the target's armor, you would still roll a D3 on the vehicle's location damage table; since most vehicles had at least three hit locations and the blast marker would hit all of them, it was statistically likely that any vehicle hit would be at very least crippled by the shot regardless of whether the round actually penetrated the armor.

Taken to extremes with some weapons mounted on Titans in Apocalypse. In a game where most weapons have Strength ratings from 1 (puny) to 10 (bunker-busting), Titan weapons can have a Strength value of D: short for Destroyer weapon. A hit with a Destroyer weapon lets you roll a d6 — 2 or higher automatically gives the target D3 wounds. A 6 can give it as many astwelve. And keep in mind some of these weapons use a blast marker that's a full 12" in diameter. Apocalyptic indeed.

Also, the Imperial Penal Legions follow this trope straight, being armies primarily conscripted from the inmates of Imperial prisons. When the Planetary Defense Force contributions to the Imperial Guard from worlds that serve as incarceration centers, the line between "penal legion" and "PDF" become indistinct.

Most Penal Legions are formed of people that are desperately trying to clear their records by volunteering for military service, rather than accepting execution. Given that the penal legions are sent to some of the theaters where the fighting is nastiest, and they are considered expendable, this has some overtones of Redemption Equals Death. It's worth noting that there is no shortage of capital offences in the Imperium, so it's not uncommon for people to be eligible for induction into a Penal Legion for some really odd reasons, to our sensibilities (this is a setting where you can circumstantially wind up executed for standing on the same planet as a heretic).

One of the worst cases for the loyalist Imperial Guard are the Salvar Chem Dogs, a regiment consisting of only drug-addicted, psychopathic thieves and murderers who are only held under control by said drug addictions, and promises of large quantities of whatever stuff they crave.

The Night Lords are a sterling example, since they had been recruited from Nostramo, a world where the people have a seemingly-neurotic disposition towards sadism and crime. Curiously enough, while one would think this would make them highly suited to worshiping Chaos, they are the most secular of the Traitor Legions.

Many gangs in the Imperium teach many young men and women to be street-smart, callous, and how to handle basic weapons training from a very young age. Consequently, gangs from Hive Worlds that are large enough to fit this trope themselves, and the governing bodies will either sponsor and legitimize the most successful gangs, mostly as PDF divisions; or hunt them down and press gang them as recruits for the Guard, or an Astartes Chapter

Granted, much of the indoctrination and brain-washing involved in Space Marine training will inevitably white-wash much of the recruits' background, so few Chapters ever really come to fit the trope, even if Guard regiments do on occasion.

In the past, Warhammer 40,000 was essentially WarhammerIN SPACE!, with many setting and system elements borrowed directly from the other game; however, as time went on, both the setting and the system moved away from their Warhammer roots, and the two games are now distinctly different beasts. The game developers have actively defied the "40,000" part of the title becoming an artifact, as they steadfastly refuse to advance the metaplot past the end of the 41st millennium (though some Black Library authors, particularly Sandy Mitchell, have included elements from the early 42nd).

They advanced the official plot into the 42nd millennium during the Eye of Terror campaign in 2004, which focused on the 13th Black Crusade of Abaddon. Canonically, the Crusade began on December 30th, 40999 and would've lasted years if not decades. However, the 6th Edition rulebook published in 2012 seems to reverse this decision, referring to the 13th Black Crusade as something that hasn't happened yet.

The title of "Warhammer" was originally named for Ghal Maraz, the magical Warhammer of Sigmar from the Fantasy Game (and it was a usable piece of equipment). With the game being rebranded as "Warhammer: Age of Sigmar", the name Warhammer itself might be becoming an artifact, as the titular Warhammer is no longer featured in either game systems (However the Warhammer is a prominent symbol of Sigmar in the new game).

Artificial Afterlife: The Eldar all carry Waystone Soul Jars to absorb their minds upon death. Those are then integrated into their Craftworld's Infinity Circuit to join the psychic gestalt of their ancestors: the closest thing they have to an afterlife since the Chaos God Slaanesh was born and started eating the soul of every Eldar without a Waystone's protection.

Artificial Limbs: May be the above Arm Cannon. Even in the higher echelons of pretty much every Imperial organisation, there is some discrepancy over just how damaged limbs are replaced: Sometimes there are actual flesh and blood vat-grown limbs, but most of the time it's large, mechanical, piston-driven coolness.

Iron Legion and Iron Warriors Chaos Marines love this trope, as do the Loyalist Iron Hands and Adeptus Mechanicus.

Art Major Biology: First the genetically-engineered supermen are designed to look cool, then they later explain how it (wouldn't) work.

Art Shift: The overtly sexual models, especially the topless females, were phased out in the late 2000s in favor of a more PG-13 treatment. This has the side effect of making some of the older models still in print (like the Forge World model for a Keeper of Secrets) look like something from a completely different model line.

Ascended Meme: When the Blood Angels codex (written by Matt Ward) came out, a lot of people called the Stormraven a 'flying land raider'. In the Grey Knights codex, released a bit later by the same author, it is mentioned that the Stormraven in "often likened to a flying Land Raider."

In-universe: Commissar Yarrick heard a rumor that he could kill a man with a glare; he had one of his eyes replaced with a laser so he could do just that.

The Atoner: Being sent on a "penitent crusade" is a common punishment for Space Marines chapters who have fallen astray from the Imperium, but not far enough to be considered excommunicated. The most notable are the Lamenters, Executioners, and Mantis Warriors are chapters who participated in the Imperial civil war centering around the loyalty of several Space Marine Chapters, called the Badab War. Averted for the ringleaders of that war, the Astral Claws and their Chapter Master Lufgt Huron, who went out-and-out traitor.

Bizarrely, both Cypher and at least some of the rest of the Fallen Angels who believe they may have been mislead during their Legion's schism. And their "parent", the Dark Angels and their descendant Chapters who hunt them, since they believe that a handful of their number who went renegade at the dawn of the Imperium can be seen as a sign of sin and corruption for the greater collective of the Dark Angels.

The regiments of the Death Korps of Krieg are driven by their need to atone for their planet turning against the Emperor of Terra thousands of years ago.

During the Horus Heresy, the Emperor called upon the Forge World of Vostroya to supply desperately-needed soldiers for the war effort. The Vostroyans, believing that it was better for the population to stay on the planet and run the factories, Refused the Call. In the aftermath of the Heresy, with the guilt of failing the Emperor hanging over their heads, the Vostroyans vowed to never again fail to heed the call of arms. Since then, the firstborn of every family on the planet— man or woman, noble or commoner— is inducted into the Imperial Guard (into a regiment suitably known as the Vostroyan Firstborn).

Athens and Sparta: The Eldar see themselves as the only civilized people in a galaxy of barbarians, and will not hesitate to sacrifice thousands of humans to save a single Eldar's life thousands of years down the line. Justified somewhat in that they're the second-oldest people in the galaxy fighting to retain what's left of their empire, and can't reproduce without a very strong chance of losing their soul.

The Tau see themselves as bringing peace and enlightenment to the ignorant races around them. Unfortunately, due to being cut off from the rest of the galaxy for millenia they're unaware that these other races have been in constant war for 10,000 years. The few that have actually learned about the scale of what they face have either been shattered by despair or gone a bit... funny.

Orks are the barbarian race to everyone else by default, and proud of it.

Khorne and Slaanesh's minions have this relationship. Slaanesh is the god(dess) of hedonism, whose worship involves excess and the use of senses (including art in all its forms), so the Slaaneshi see Khornates as brutal morons. Khorne is the embodiment of rage, who demands constant bloodshed both from his enemies and his troops, so Khornates see the Slaaneshi as limp-wristed and effeminate. Khornates and Tzeentchians (Squishy Wizards, schemers and manipulators who worship the god of sorcery and deceit) see each other in a similar way, and for much the same reasons.

Augmented Reality: Used extensively by the Tau, and in a more subdued fashion by the Space Marines. Both factions utilize compact sensors built into their suits to provide their soldiers with battlefield data, rendered in real-time overlays on top of their more basic optical feeds. The former use sophisticated battle networks to distribute the information Cadre-wide, while the latter depend on the systems built into their Power Armor to operate on a personal level.

Authority Equals Asskicking: Many Chaos leaders are warp-enhanced, the original Primarchs literally were demigods, and Ork and Tyranid leaders are Large and in Charge. Prevalent for all races in the tabletop game, though in later editions, either justified or rectified— taking away things like the unrealistically high Toughness of human characters, justifying the amazing weapon skills of certain heroes because they've literally been doing this sort of thing for centuries.

Also, this trope is arguably justified in that surviving to be promoted so high in Warhammer 40000 is really unlikely to be based off your luck. And if it is, you just won't survive in that position for very long.

Marneus Calgar, chapter master of the Ultramarines, has a special rule titled "God of War". 'nuff said.

Author's Saving Throw: Invoked. Any piece of fluff that ends up badly written or ends up painting any faction as a Mary Sue can be safely written off as in-universe propaganda.

Awesome, but Impractical: You could say 40k was BUILT on this trope. The basic heavy weapon for the Imperium is a hand held semi-automatic armor piercing grenade launcher, chainsaw swords abound, the Orks partially function on Clap Your Hands If You Believe and duct tape, the Eldar have slightly better protection than a cardboard box while retaining maximum style points, and the space ships get around by traveling through Hell. It's all awesome, but none of it's remotely practical.

The Tau are the only exception, building up units that only support each other with minimal flashiness. For a long time, they were also the only faction that didn't have any Titans, considering the giant machines a waste of resources best put elsewhere. This attitude eventually bit them in the ass during the Damocles Gulf Crusade, where the Tau were massacred every time the Imperium deployed a Titan, and very quickly began development of their own. That said, Tau Titans are still an exception, as they eschew the melee capabilities of all other Titans in favor of being absolutely covered in the biggest and nastiest guns the Earth Caste can conceive of. Before they had there own they developed effective titan-killing methods by the simple expedient of strapping really big guns to their bombers; ludicrous overkill against anything smaller than a superheavy vehicle, but a lot cheaper than the titan it just killed.

Abaddon the Despoiler can One-Hit Kill practically anything and not even elite troops can slow him down, but he has no movement modifiers so you could just stay away from him the whole game. Also, since he wears Terminator Armour, you'll need to buy one of those if you want to drive him around, but anyone with even an inkling of what Abaddon can do in melee will throw everything at his ride.

Khorne Berserkers. The worst of the bunch is Kharn the Betrayer, who's so bloodthirsty that any missed attacks in close combat hit anyone in the same squad as him. Known to randomly kill anyone in his way, even other Khorne Berserkers.

Lesser Axe Crazies include Imperial Penal Legion troopers, Blood Angel Space Marines in the throes of the Black Rage, and the entire Ork race, especially members of the Goff klan.

Eversor Assassins are crazy and constantly pumped with hyperactive drugs and bio-engineered to reach the very limits of the human physiology. They're used to destroy the enemy's command structure by killing everybody. Eversors are insane to the point that they have to be kept in cryo-stasis between their missions.

The Space Marines are an army of genetically-and-cybernetically-enhanced giants clad in Powered Armour and wielding chainsaw swords and firearms which fire explosive shells the size of a human's fist. They live for centuries barring death in battle, and their Training from Hell has a survival rate of 1 in every 1000.

Chaos Space Marines are everything described above, plus being individually better fighters due to living even longer and due to being augmented by daemonic power (though they do lack some of the Space Marines' more advanced weapons and equipment).

The Necrons. They get back up after you kill them, their standard infantry weapons can vaporize tanks, and they're one of the deadliest forces in the setting while not even being all awake yet. Oh, and they managed to break through the defenses surrounding Mars... with only five ships.

Da Orks! They can withstand laser fire like it's nothing, rip a man limb from limb with their bare hands, they can defeat armies much more advanced than them with weapons cobbled together from scrap (which work because the Orks believe they do), and they'll often massively outnumber all of their opponents on any given day.

The Eldar Aspect Warriors are hyper-specialist fighters trained to be extremely deadly in one aspect of warfare, be it close combat, firefights or tank hunting. Imagine if you gave Tolkien's elvesrazor wire guns and psychic powers.

Every Long Fang and Grey Hunter worth his salt must have one— besides, when you're a nine-foot tall, genetically engineered killing machine that also happens to be a Viking Expy, there's no way your beard can't be badass.

The new Space Marine squad kits now include one or two bearded heads, so now your grizzled sergeant can be even more grizzled by boasting one of these.

Badass Biker: How much more badass do you get than screaming green maniacs on ramshackle scrap-metal motorbikes laden with giant machine guns? Oh yeah, that would be the Super Soldiers on giant armored bikes the size of cars. Or the evil Super Soldiers on hell motorbikes covered in blades and skulls... or maybe the space-elf knights on flying bikes with laser lances... or the evil space elves that can fly their bladed flying death bikes with enough skill to cut specific arteries.

Sammael, Master of the Ravenwing, rides upon the last Imperial Jetbike, known as Corvex. This thing is the size of a truck and on top of mounting two stormbolters within its bow (yes, it has a bow), it also mounts a massive plasma cannon. Sammael himself is no slouch in the badass department either, as he has Eternal Warrior, which indicates that he can survive an anti-tank missile to the face.

Please. Wazdakka Gutsmek beats all of those, in fact he may well be one of the most badass bikers in all fiction. Gutsmek never gets off his kustom warbike, the Bike of the Aporkalypse, except to tinker with it— he ordered the Doks to cook up a special stimulant so he never has to sleep. His bike has a special kannon on it which has enough firepower to punch through a Leman Russ battletank and send his bike flying backwards every time he fires it. He once took out a Warlord Titan by ramping his bike off a cliff and crashing through the shields and into the cockpit where he proceeded to butcher the Titan's crew. Gutsmek's dream is to one day open a Portal Network that would allow him to ride his bike from one end of the galaxy to the other without stopping, and if some other bikerboyz want to tag along, who knows what might happen...

Badass in a Nice Suit: Some Commissars, priests of the Ecclesiarchy, and Inquisitors make a point of dressing conservatively or humbly. The rest gleefully embrace the same Bling of War worn by everyone else.

Badass Longcoat: Common in the Imperial Guard. Commissars, most obviously, but Generals often wear them too. For the Krieg Death Corps and Valhallan Ice Warriors, these are pretty much the uniform. Dark Angels Space Marines, loyalist and Fallen, tend to wear them as well. And let's not forget Fabius Bile, who has a pretty pimpin' longcoat that's made of human skin.

Badass Mustache: Basically anybody from the White Scars Chapter. Also very common among the Praetorian regiments, thanks to their Boer-War Redcoat fashion sense.

Badass Normal: The big selling point of the Imperial Guard is that they're just ordinary men and women just like you and me, taking up arms against bio-engineered killing machines, superhuman ancient warriors and all kinds of supernatural horrors, and beating them with copious amounts of combined-arms warfare and disposable bodies.

Especially Catachan Jungle Fighters and other Death World regiments, and ESPECIALLY distinguished members of those regiments such as Sergeant "Stonetooth" Harker, who, in his personal Crowning Moment of Awesome, caught a Tyranid Ravener in a headlock and crushed its neck with his biceps.

Imperial Guard Commissars, who are employed to keep morale up by setting a heroic example— and by shooting cowards and incompetents if necessary. Ok, maybe many Commissars have the justification of shooting fleeing men because there are a lot that can follow suit, and their infantry depend on More Dakka via their numbers to kill stuff, but...

Largely averted by the novel protagonists Ibram Gaunt and Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!. Gaunt genuinely cares for his troops and tries to avoid wasting their lives needlessly, and he is working with a finite number of troops and cannot afford to be wasteful, while Cain knows that eventually his schemes to get out of trouble will fail, at which point he would prefer that his troops like him enough to watch his back rather than aim for it. He is also very aware of the Oops, Sorry Sir! rule mentioned above. It helps that both men are basically understanding and honorable individuals (much as Cain would deny it), attached to disciplined regiments that don't have any kind of wide-spread morale problems.

Commander Chenkov of Valhalla routinely abuses the Imperial Guard's reserves to overwhelm the enemy with endless waves of poorly-trained, disposable conscripts. He's also been known to use his troops to clear minefields for tanks and bog enemy units down so that the artillery can shell them, and once executed a million of his own men to build a dam from their bodies. His regiment, the Tundra Wolves, has been refounded more than a dozen times in recent decades due to casualties, and it's rumored that he's killed more of his own men than he has of the enemy. And of course, since this is the Imperium, he's routinely awarded medals and commendations for inexplicably defeating the enemy with these brutal tactics rather than court-martialled and shot for wasting the Emperor's resources.

Ork Nobz also aren't above "krakkin' a few uv da ladz' 'eadz" (often fatally) in order to restore order, and Runtherdz maintain the "morale" of their Gretchin charges by having their squighounds devour a couple of them whenever they try to flee.

The grand master of this trope (insofar as the 40k universe has a grand master of horribleness) is Abaddon the Despoiler, Warmaster of Chaos. A fairly unpleasant person BEFORE he turned to Chaos, Abbadon is very much a believer in the Darth Vader approach of anger control, namely immediately killing those who displease him. However, this being the GRIMDARK setting it is, Abaddon takes it just one step further and will happily destroy ships of his own fleet if the captain of said vessel displeases him. And keep in mind his flagship is the aptly titled PlanetKiller.

Not to mention that Abaddon takes offense in any mere mortal looking at him.

Justified — if you don't feel the tremors of an approaching Titan, you deserve what you get. Somehow, Titans are still able to sneak up on people despite this in Titanicus.

The Tyranid Mawlocs do this as well. Just before they pop out of the ground and EAT YOU, in best Tremorsstyle.

Balancing Death's Books: The Legion of the Damned have a chapter artifact allowing them to use the soul of a slain foe to bring back their fallen comrade. Since they're essentially permanently phasing in an out of battle, this is the only reason they haven't died out.

Bald of Awesome: The stereotypical look for Space Marines, except for the Space Wolves and the Blood Angels. Shaved heads are also common.

Some exorcisms in 40K work like this, though the majority just involve killing the daemon's corporeal form (much easier said than done for the more powerful ones).

The Exorcists chapter of Space Marines (based on the planet Banish) go through a ritual where a minor Warp entity is deliberately summoned into an Marine's body under the maximum security the Chapter can provide and exorcized after twelve hours. Those who survive the procedure with mind and body intact are now effectively invisible to all but the most powerful of daemons, making them excellent killing machines against the forces of the Warp (their first test run saw a kill ratio of 97 to 1).

Barbarian Tribe: Many Space Marine chapters, such as the Space Wolves and White Scars, recruit solely from the Barbarians of their homeworld.

Base on Wheels: The Leviathan, a mobile command centre on treads the size of a small city... which acts as an APC for tanks.

Orks have their own version— A krawla will vary in size from a tank APC to a city on wheels which may in turn contain smaller krawlaz.

Before the setting got rid of them, the Squats specialised in these, and it was said they built the Leviathans. Back in the days when Epic was still called Space Marine, there was also the Cyclops [a colossal anti-Titan assault gun], Land Train, Colossus (a Leviathan variant), Hellbore (a ridiculously huge drilling machine), the Ordinatus machines, and the Capitol Imperialis (the modern Leviathan is a ret-combination of this tank-carrying monstrosity and the old Leviathan which was just a mobile command post).

And then there are the The Land Ships of Zayth. Entire cities mounted on tracks big enough to crush battalions of tanks.

The Imperator Titan is also essentially a base on legs which carries an entire castle around on its back, particularly when the ridiculously complex Titan Legions rules are used; the same applies to the Mega-Gargant. Variant Imperators were supposed to follow the release of the Titan Legions but never did, one of which would have had an entire aircraft carrier deck on its back.

Battle Chant: There's quite a few (to the point of that they're practically the catchphrases for some factions). The most well known comes from the Chaos forces, more specifically Khorne's worshippers: "Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!"

Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Often played straight by the Eldar (who have awesome medical tech), and by the Callidus Assassins (who are all shapeshifters). Generally avoided by the Sisters of Battle, who are about as ugly, scarred and broken as you might expect "realistic" battle-nuns to be, and get older, more grizzled, and meaner as you move up the chain of command.

Because I Said So: Frequently the only justification you'll ever get from the Inquisition.

Questioning an Inquisitor for a justification will get you executed for heresy... if you're lucky.

Killing any member of a Black Templars squad triggers the Righteous Fury spacial move, in which they charge towards the closest enemy.

Better to Die than Be Killed: Considered an honourable end for disgraced Imperial Guard officers and those touched by the Warp, and much preferable to being taken alive by the Ecclesiarchy or Dark Eldar or Chaos or the Inquisition or the Necrons or the Tyranids or...

BFG: Way, way too many to list here. No, seriously. Don't try to add specific examples, it's ended in pain before, so save time and check one of the many wikis dedicated to this, such as Lexicanum. Let's just say that the bolter, the standard issue Space Marine gun, rapid-fires .75 caliber armour piercing rocket propelled grenades. It fires 19mm caliber grenades, that's as large as a 10-gauge shell and it goes upwards from there, especially considering that is also the same round the standard-issue Space Marine pistol uses.

Special mention must go to the Dawn Blade wielded by Commander Farsight, which not only has to be mounted on a battlesuit, but can hack through tank armour. And it's got crackling energies all over it. About the only thing it lacks is a chainsaw edge.

Most Daemon Weapons (and most daemons' weapons, which aren't quite the same thing). Special mention also goes to the one held by the Champion Greater Daemon of Slaanesh, which is almost as long as a tank (although the daemon in question is rather huge even by daemon standards).

Some of the artwork floating around shows the Space Marine Primarchs using variants on the aforementioned chainsaw swords that make the ones used by regular Marines look quite puny (especially considering that the Primarchs are generally accepted as being even bigger than your "average" eight-foot tall Super Soldier). An excellent example can be seen here with Imperial Fists Primarch Rogal Dorn, holding a chainsword so wide a person could probably hide behind it◊.

Drach'nyen is probably the single biggest, baddest sword in the setting and is capable of cutting through the fabric of reality itself. It's not always a BFS, though. Drach'nyen's shape depends on what its wielder wants it to look like, it just so happens Abaddon wants it to appear as a giant sword. Why he needs such a big sword when he doesn't even have any arms is another question altogether.

Big Bad Ensemble: Once again, taken Up to Eleven with entire armies qualifying for this 'bull. If we get into the full details, we might have to give 40k its own page for it, so for now, we'll just settle with naming the biggest villains in order of threat level, from mildest to most extreme: Ork Warbosses, Chaos Lords, Daemon Primarchs, the Tyranid Hive Mind and the Chaos gods. The specific characters that most qualify:

Ezekyle Abaddon, called the Despoiler, leader of the Black Legion of the Chaos Space Marines and the figurehead of the thirteen Black Crusades that have tried to overthrow the Imperium.

Erebus. If any one character in 40K can be said to be responsible for the state of the galaxy, it's Erebus of the Word Bearers, the first Space Marine to willingly fall to Chaos and the architect of the Horus Heresy.

Asdrubael Vect, the leader of the most powerful kabal of the Dark Eldar and the de facto leader of the entire Dark Eldar race.

Ghazghkull Mag uruk Thraka, one of the most powerful Ork Warlords ever and the leader of one of the most devastating Waaagh!'s in history.

Big Book of War: The Tactica Imperium and the Codex Astartes. The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer would be this— it's actually pretty useful in some places, containing useful and informative tips such as how to make a frag grenade into a booby trap, how to field-strip and clean a lasgun, and how when you are on guard duty you should NEVER LEAVE YOUR POST EVER... were it not otherwise full of outright lies— er, uplifting Imperial propaganda. As a sidenote: The Tactica Imperium is regarded with near-religious reverence by the Imperial Guard, and its description as occasionally self-contradictory and best used as a rough guideline even suggests similarity to the Bible. Conversely, the Uplifting Primer is considered extra toilet paper rations.

Big Damn Heroes: Happens a lot in the fluff. Possible in game via deep strike or simply charging an enemy to save the poor bastards (on your team) they're slaughtering.

Tyranids are a species that eats every last scrap of life from entire planets, down to sucking the last trace molecules of bio-matter from the soil.

A legendary figure amongst the Officio Assassinorum is the Callidus known as "Mother Gullet", who was once dispatched to slay the child of a potentially rebellious governor. She swallowed the sleeping baby whole and escaped into the darkness, her bloated stomach ensuring that there was no sign of her responsibility in the child's disappearance... or of the child's remains.

Mostly justified as part of the philosophy of a miniatures war game: it makes sense for the more powerful units in an army to be bigger and more visible on the tabletop; just as it makes sense for a larger -i.e. more expensive- miniature to be more useful in-game for the player. When it comes to the Imperium, however, their obsession with big swords, bigger guns and ridiculously humongous mecha makes you wonder whether they really are Compensating for Something.

Biomanipulation: Some of the Biomancer powers like Regenerate, Iron Arm and Endurance fall under this powerset.

Bishōnen: Lucius the Eternal, before he started scarring his face to commemorate his victories.

Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels, was very much a pretty boy and a fairly nice guy for this setting. Fittingly, he was called the Angel, but that was also due to his wings.

Mephiston, Lord of Death has it in spades. Also a Blood Angel, and considered by some to be Sanguinius reborn.

Fulgrim the Phoenician, Primarch of the Emperor's Children, before he became a Daemon Prince.

Followers of Slaanesh can be this, but most tend to mutate or become increasingly grotesque as they descend deeper into debauchery.

Slaanesh itself counts (kinda) and has such a divine and unholy beauty, that looking upon him with your own eyes would be to forfeit your soul.

Bittersweet Ending: Surprisingly, this is how the 41st millennium—an era known In-Universe as "The Time of Ending"—reaches its conclusion: Cadia is destroyed, causing the Eye of Terror to expand into the Great Rift, slicing the galaxy in half with horrific Warp storms, Craftworld Biel-Tan is destroyed, and the Traitor Legions are running rampant in the galaxy. However, the Eldar managed to successfully bring Yvraine to life without destroying their species, and Roboute Guilliman is revived, named Imperial Regent by the Emperor Himself, and declares the Indomitus Crusade to reclaim the half of the Imperium cut off by the Great Rift, unleashing the new Primaris Marines to help fight it and reinforce numerous severely depleted Chapters along the way. The era known as "the Dark Millennium" comes off as a win for the two main "good guy" factions.

Black Box: The Adeptus Mechanicus does not understand a lot of the stuff they reproduce. It's taken to a ludicrous extreme by Graham McNeill's Priests of Mars novels, in which the flagship Speranza has unimaginably super-high-tech targeting systems that NOBODY knows about, systems capable of functioning with 100% precision in the middle of a space-time gravitational storm, fully capable of detecting and getting a One-Hit Kill on an eldar cruiser using a dorsal mounted chrono-weapon so unbelievably advanced even the necrons would have been scratching their heads trying to understand how it worked. That's right. The Ark Mechanicus ships which the Imperium already own and operate could be the answer to the missing information of the STCs and more.

Black Comedy: The humor in this setting is either this or very, very dry.

Blade on a Stick: A number of Grey Knights' Nemesis Force Weapons come in the form of glaives; it's the default form for them in Dawn of War.

The Necron warscythe is one of the most feared close-combat weapons in existence— a glaive that can cut through energy fields without slowing down.

The honor blades used by Tau Ethereals. The blades are swung fast enough to become invisible, and are used in bloodless duels to settle disputes. Aun'shi carries one on the battle field, and is skilled enough with it to kill enough Orks that they are to afraid to go near him.

The Berserker Glaive from the 3rd edition of Chaos Space Marines. Averted on occasion, though, as Daemon Weapons do not always resemble their given description.

Blind Seer: The soul-binding process required to turn psykers into Astropaths— interstellar telepaths used for all long-distance communication— completely burns out their eyes, though their psychic abilities generally compensate for it. Many non-Astropath psykers are also depicted as physically blind.

Bling of War: There's a reason it's called "war gear". Running on Rule of Cool, if you see something Blingtastic, both the equipment and the user are badass enough to have earned this title.

The Gods of Chaos aren't evil per se, but they are all embodiments of an ideology that they spread, and it does bring harm to others. Tzeentch screws people over for the sake of screwing people over, Nurgle literally loves to inflict diseases on you and believes your misery is thanking him, Khorne believes in bloodshed, battle and honourable death, and Slaanesh is devoted to pleasure and indulgence, healthy or not.

To an Ork, the most important thing in the universe is war— I mean WAAAAAAGH, and think nothing of rampaging across the galaxy fighting everything they find. They have no concept of good or evil, only Might Makes Right. They also have no concept of friendship, although some have favourite enemies.

Boarding Pod: The Astartes have a reusable version, small shuttlepods launched at spaceships they wish to board. These things attach to the other vessel's outer hull and create a breach that allows the troops to enter through it. The orks have a more traditional version that is shot out of a torpedo tube and penetrates by kinetic force.

Bodyguard Babes: The corrupt Master of the Administratum and dictator of the Imperium Goge Vandire had an all-female bodyguard known as the Brides Of The Emperor, who were conditioned to believe everything he said unquestioningly and practically worship him. They later became the Sisters of Battle.

Bodyguard Betrayal: Aforementioned Brides Of The Emperor turned on Vandire and beheaded him after their leaders had an audience with their god, the Emperor. They are now known as the Sisters Of Battle.

Body Motifs: Eyes and hands are prevalent motifs in this series. Examples are The Eye of Tzeentch, Magnus losing one of his eyes, Ferrus Mannus with his Iron Hands (both literal and his Sons), Rogal Dorn's Imperial Fists and the only relic of him being a severed hand.

Bond Creatures: Both natural, in the somewhat obscure Gyrinx, and the various creations serving psykers as Familiars.

Boring, but Practical: Or as close to 'boring' as it gets in the setting anyhow... all armies are able to field powerful special troops, amazing heroes and crazy war machines, but you generally cannot win without a good chunk of your army being made up of some variant or another of your standard rank-and-file troops, a fact often referred to as 'Boys before toys'.

Special mention should go to lasguns of the Imperial Guard. They are mocked by fans as "flashlights", and compared to Bolters, Melta Guns and Plasma weaponry, they are definitely boring and weak in means of damage. But the sheer economics of this weapon makes it more awesome and practical than any of the weapons mentioned above: They are cheap and easy to produce. They don't need ammunition in the usual sense. Lasguns use changeable batteries that are easy to recharge, and can even recharge themselves in direct sunlight or campfire. And the weapon itself is so easy to handle that anyone can use them. The Price/Performance ratio makes this gun the most awesome weapon of the 41th Millenium, and allows the Imperium to have armies big and versatile enough to protect its vast territories.

The Rhino transport used by both the Loyalist and Traitor Astartes is without a doubt the most ubiquitous and useful vehicle in the entire 41st Millennium. The Rhino was around during mankind's initial colonisation in the galaxy and has changed little in 10,000 years, it can be constructed on planets with even rudimentary industry and can run on any combustible fuel source, from promethium to coal and wood. The Rhino is also a reliable chassis to all sorts of weaponised permutations - the Predator battle tank, the Whirlwind rocket artillery, and the Vindicator siege gun to name a few. The METALBAWKSES have a good use gameplay-wise: they get your squad where they need to be when they need to as well as acting as a "tar pit", something to tie up the enemy player's forces (in this case, mobile cover).

Boring Invincible Hero: Every faction tends to get this treatment in its own codex, in a manner appropriate to the race (e.g. the Space Marines tend to emerge triumphant against overwhelming odds, the Imperial Guard tend to win through attrition and great loss of life, the Orks tend to win by being Crazy Awesome, etc). Conversely, if a faction appears in someone else's codex, it usually means they're getting Worfed.

Born Under the Sail: Among the Space Wolves (Basically Space Vikings), Engir Krakendoom's tribe are known for being the best sailors, hunting sea monsters with nothing but oars, harpoons and axes. Their skills translate well when Space Is an Ocean, and so his Company excels at boarding and ship-to-ship combat.

Bowdlerization: The game's second edition. Much of the Imperium's nastiness was downplayed or went largely unmentioned. Inquisitors and Imperial Guard Commissars were described as heroic individuals. Commissars even lost the ability to restore unit morale by means of summary execution. These issues were all brutally redressed in the third edition.

Brainwashed and Crazy: Much loved by Chaos. The Imperial Ecclesiarchy also likes to combine heretics with a partial lobotomy, advanced hypnosis, generic brainwashing, combat drugs and cybernetic implants to create Arcoflagellants, Ax-Crazy combat monsters which are often set against their former allies.

Bribing Your WayTo Being Able To Play: A starter army, with the rule book, matching codex, bitz for customization, paints and glues, and a case to put it all in? Expect to put down half a grand. At least.

Unless you get your pieces off eBay. The market's saturated.

Depend on what army you play. If you play World Eaters, you can get two squads of Khorne Berserkers and Kharn the Betrayer for about 50 bucks and have a pretty decent 500 point army.

Brown Note: Chaos iconography can drive men insane. Chaos daemons are a whole world of horror beyond that.

Unaugmented humans viewing primarchs for the first time tend to react... badly. One boy, upon meeting pre-Heresy Lorgar, suffered from vomiting and nightmares for a few weeks. The book describes the phenomenon as sensory overload.

To a psyker, a Pariah (someone who has no Warp presence) can serve as this.

Tyranid psychic chatter is this both to psykers and to the Warp, effectively jamming any sort of communication or faster-than-light travel.

Bulletproof Vest: The standard Imperial Guardsman is equipped with a flashlight and T-shirt a lasgun and flak vest. Formidable stuff by modern standards, but guess how much good it does in this universe.

In an interesting twist, the guardsman's flak armor is the best starting armor of any of the careers in Dark Heresy.

Played for laughs with grots. Played straight with Imperial Guard as they were Games Workshop's favorite punching bag. Even extended to the players as they got two consecutive underpowered codices with at least half the units being useless and had to (and still do) deal with kill points making the Annihilate mission Unwinnable. GW eventually decided to give IG players a break by releasing a codex that was actually good and giving them the lion's share of stuff in Apocalypse. Case in point: meet the business end of a Baneblade. Who's the Butt-Monkey now?

Also played straight with Ka'Bandha. Keep in mind that he's a 20-foot-tall Greater Daemon of the Blood God. Yet every time he goes up against the Blood Angels, he just ends up embarrassing himself.

On Signus Prime, he broke the legs of Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels. Except that by doing so, he awoke a dark rage in the Angels, and his forces were soon overrun.

At the Siege of Terra, he almost defeated Sanguinius a second time, but the Primarch seized the huge honking demon by the throat and broke his spine. Over his knee.

Later, on Khartas. At this point, Sanguinius had been dead for 10,000 years. Ka'Bandha figures he's got it made now. He then gets bodyslammed by the mysterious figure known as the Sanguinor. To death. From orbit.

In fairness, it's theorized that the Sanguinor is the ghost of Sanguinius. Not that this helps Ka'Bandha's rep much.

The Craftworld Eldar. They are notorious for suffering humiliating defeats and failures despite holding an overwhelming advantage, and any victories they do claim are mostly pyrrhic in nature. Examples include Iyanden's Avatar of Khaine being trampled by Carnifexes note It killed at least 10 of them single handedly (and they were all attacking him at once to boot) before being destroyed , Wraithlords being slain in one-on-one combat with lowly Sergeants, whole craftworlds being utterly wiped out by a single Zoanthrope, and two Imperial Guard regiments led by an inexperienced commander note Okay, admittedly they were supported by Space Wolves and a few Titans held off the collective forces of two major craftworlds and a large force of Eldar Corsairs. C'mon, they're supposed to be hyper-advanced aliens with psychic powers, yet when said aliens outnumber the flashlight and T-shirt brigade and still lose, it's very grating.

The Sisters of Battle now take up the mantle left behind by the Imperial Guard. Seemingly, every time the Sisters appear, they're being horribly slaughtered by the Faction of the Week... when they aren't falling to Chaos, obviously note This contradicts previous fluff which notes that in their thousands of years of service, only a single Battle Sister has fallen to Chaos or even being slaughtered by their own allies (NOTE: link is NSFW).

Deconstructed with the Iron Warriors, who are amongst the most bitter and hateful of all Chaos Space Marines after being treated as the Butt-Monkey of the legions.

Buzzing the Deck: Orks are well known for this, it's how they land (landing gear is for sissies). Deff Skwadron takes this a little further than most: when their entire skwadron is undergoing maintenance when they're needed in a fight, they simply turn the planes into impromptu jetbikes.

Urien Rakarth, the Dark Eldar Master Haemonculus, discovered the secret of resurrecting himself so long ago, and has done it so many times, that things have started to go inexplicably wrong with the process. He now tends to come back with a small physical reminder of each previous resurrection, usually additional vestigial limbs growing from his spinal sump. Being an utterly insane genius surgeon, body modifier, peerless torturer, and obsessive experimenter, Urien regards this condition as little more than a fascinating quirk and certainly nothing to get all angsty about. Indeed, Urien is so jaded that he practically collects deaths and looks forward to seeing what new and unusual ways he will come back wrong in next.

Necron resurrection protocols teleport damaged units back to their tombs for repair. Necron platforms are over sixty-five million years old, their tech hasn't always weathered the aeons, they get bashed up a lot, and the lords skimped on the quality of their foot soldiers, so Necrons pick up aberrations as they get refurbished: the foot soldiers are barely sentient anymore and describing some lords as "deranged" would be putting it mildly.

Craftworld Altansar failed to escape the Eye of Terror during the Fall of the Eldar. It has always been thought long lost until recently, when it emerged from the swirling Eye. However, they have changed: the Eldar of Altansar never remove their helmets and speak only in whispers, causing other Eldar to wonder just what has happened to them.

According to a microstory in the Inquisitor rulebook, two of the Inquisition's founders opposed the idea of the Emperor being revived in the wake of the Horus Heresy, because they were afraid that what they brought back wouldn't be the man they once knew. For better or worse, they got their way— he's still stuck on the Golden Throne ten thousand years later.

Canon Discontinuity: Several older Black Library novels have since become available for reprint, but many of them were written when the setting was in a different place than it currently is. Rather than edit them in a way which might undermine the original story or authorial intent, Black Library instead decided to slap the "Heretic Tomes"note (which was an older print label Games Workshop used before formally incorporating its publishing division under the label "Black Library") label on the reprints. This means that the reader should only consider these canon in the most Broad Strokes.

Canon Immigrant: Most notable are the Blood Ravens chapter, created whole cloth for the Dawn of War series, who now enjoy a place of prominence in the tabletop's lore.

Around the same time, the Rail Rifle was introduced in Fire Warrior for the Tau. Very quickly, rules and models appeared in a White Dwarf article, which were subsequently properly included in the 4th edition Tau Codex.

Can't Have Sex, Ever: For the last 15,000-odd years, the Eldar. Slaanesh, the Chaos God of pleasure and excess, is innately tied to the Eldar, and any excess of emotion or pleasure on their part will immediately draw the attention of She Who Thirsts. While the Dark Eldar burn out the souls of their slaves to get around this, Craftworld Eldar instead practice asceticism and self-denial to avoid being eaten. May explain why their "aloof and superior" attitude usually ends up coming off as them just being crabby and spiteful.

The 5th Edition rules allow you to ram tanks into other vehicles, which can potentially take out several enemies at once.

Card Games: There's been a few actual card games released based on the 40K universe. One could also easily count Second Edition and earlier editions of Epic, which came packaged with a whole dead forest worth of cards, counters, templates and assorted other bits and pieces, sometimes including entire decks for mechanics like the Winds of the Warp or things like the Imperator and Mega-Gargant templates and counters which were entire mini-games in their own right.

Cargo Cult: The Imperium of Man combines this with Ancient Astronauts in an interesting fashion, as the overwhelming majority of the technology they use predates the incident that put the Emperor on life-support, and maintenance has become more of a religious ceremony than anything else.

Ironically, all of the equipment used by the Imperium is kept at optimal efficiency because of all this, since a clean and well-maintained machine is a happy machine, and a happy machine means a happy machine-god. It also means that there's never an issue with poor quality materials being used (although field repairs do happen, which is looked down upon by the Adeptus Mechanicus). The Mechanicus are often depicted as competent engineers despite/because of their mystical approach, who understand the workings of many things and for whom reverse-engineering the rest and discovering the physics responsible is a holy quest for enlightenment.

Cast Full of Crazy: Invoked, as each faction is considered completely nuts by at least one other. The Imperium sees Orks as stupid psychopaths and the Eldar and Chaos Legions as hedonistic heretics, the Tau view the humans as crazy for their "defend to the death" mentality, the Eldar view the Tau as naive, and everyone is scared of the Tyranids.

Quite averted with Warp travel. Comparatively few Imperial ships have Warp engines and travel time is inconsistent. If the Gellar fields fail during transit for any amount of time, daemons can manifest inside the ship and devour its crew and complement.

Tau have a slightly easier time of it, due to their smaller warp presence, but their current warp drives only allow short "dives", so while safer it's comparatively slow (although still far faster than light).

The Tyranids have it easy enough: point fleet at star, mess with star's gravity to create an FTL tunnel and ride on in (not to mention the natural disasters this causes often tenderize the local defences).

It's worth noting that all the catchphrases are battlecries. And all battlecries are catchphrases (Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!/For the Emperor!/Harriers for the cup!)

Cat Girl: You probably wouldn't expect these to show up in a setting as grimdark as Warhammer 40,000, but they do exist. As of the 6th edition, there are cat people serving the Imperium, with fanart and custom armies portraying them, naturally, as Cat Girl amazon brigades.

The Cavalry: This is the only thing of the Legion of the Damned can do.

The Dropsite Massacre. When Horus and his legion, along with three allied legions, turned traitor a full seven legions were sent to bring them to justice. The first three legions that made planetfall and attacked the traitors were loyalists; the four that followed them, which were supposed to be their reinforcements, were not.

The Inquisition has a nasty tendency of doing this as well. Since they only tend to get involved when Things Man Was Not Meant To Know have surfaced, their typical battleplan goes as follows: Step 1 - Kill the enemy. Step 2 - Kill everyone else.

The Grey Knights used to have an Apocalypse formation that invoked this trope. They could only deploy if the enemy had at least one greater daemon or warp rift on the table and if, at any point, there were no longer any Chaos models on the table control of the Grey Knights would transfer to the opposing player and the Grey Knights would immediately begin slaughtering their allies to make sure there were no witnesses (why this couldn't wait until after the battle was over is never satisfactorily explained).

Cavalry of the Dead: The Legion of the Damned, a Space Marines chapter that got lost in the Warp and became a bunch of spectral beings. They occasionally emerge from the warp to turn the tide of a battle in favor of the Imperium before disappearing again.

Chainsaw Good: The Imperium, Chaos, Orks, and Eldar all use various types of chainblade weapons.

For the Imperium, the chainsword is a ubiquitous close combat weapon, especially among the Space Marines. The Space Wolves are fond of chainaxes, Terminator armor is often equipped with chainfistsnote a Power Fist with a short chainsword attached that is used for cutting into the hulls of ships, the Sisters Repentia use huge two-handed chainswords, and more exotic variants like the chainscythe from Necromunda can be found. These weapons' adamantium teeth have monomolecular edges, all the better to cut through enemy armor, especially since power and force weaponsnote weapons with energy fields for extra penetration and weapons that are used to channel psyker power, respectively are in relatively short supply due to the Imperium's technological limitations.

Chaos forces, especially Chaos Space Marines, use chain weapons for essentially the same reasons, although theirs are usually much nastier in form and function. Khorne Berserkers wield chainaxes almost exclusively, as their frenzied Attack! Attack! Attack! nature makes them extremely vicious and there's nothing quite like a weapon that can bash your opponent's head in and puree him at the same time, which is why the Space Wolves like them so much also.

The Striking Scorpion Aspect Shrine of the Craftworld Eldar specializes in melee combat, and those fighters wield chainswords that are very effective against Space Marine armor. While they could wield psychically-charged weapons, those are usually reserved for Warlocks and Seers, who concentrate more on psyker powers in combat.

For Orks, the thought process for using chain weapons is something like "'Ey, what makes a choppa more killy? Put some spinnin' teef on the edge!"

Chandler's Law: When in doubt, have another Tyranid/Ork/Chaos/Necron invasion.

Char Clone: With his customized silver-helmed red Battlesuit and Mysterious Past, Commander Farsight is most definitely A CHAR.

The Chessmaster: Ongoing manipulation contest between the Chaos god Tzeentch, the C'tan Deceiver, and the Eldar Seers. Chances are any major galactic happening is going to have at least one of them cackling "just as planned."

The Emperor is also a likely candidate for this trope, as it is hinted at in several texts that he knew the Horus Heresy would happen and planned for it and all future events leading up to the present and probably beyond so as to (presumably) prepare the galaxy for an ultimately happy fate.

Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Many products of the game's Early Installment Weirdness suffered this fate as the game moved from the first two editions into Third Edition. The Squats and Zoats are the most well-known victims, but there were others including Robots, Imperial Jetbikes, Snotlings, Space Slann...

Church Militant: The Adepta Sororitas are nuns with power armour and fully automatic microgrenade launchers. When Space Marines betray the Imperium, it's the Adepta Sororitas who get sent in to clean up their mess and wipe out the offenders. They usually succeed, despite being humans with none of the Space Marines' physiological upgrades.

This may have something to do with the fact that every Adepta Sororitas army is led by Olga of Kiev-level Canonesses (unless they're on loan to an Inquisitor).

Quote from the 5th ed. Codex: "It can be imagined that the creature is vaporized, burned to a pile of ash, blasted limb from limb, or otherwise mortally slain in a suitably graphic fashion."

Character Exaggeration: The Imperial Guard's leaders are generally considered General Rippers who care very little about their troops because We Have Reserves by fans, as well as Commissars being complete sadists who will kill Guardsmen at the drop of a hat. Naturally, the Imperium doesn't encourage death— the 3rd edition 2nd Imperial Guard Codex says itself "A good general does not lead an army to destruction just because he knows it will follow." The Imperium just has lower standards of 'pointless' compared to us.

You could say this about many factions. Eldrad Ulthran screws over Armaggeddon and suddenly every single Eldar ever is a clairvoyant human-hating Magnificent Bastard; heck, Idranel from Dawn of War is basically a gender-flipped version of him. Likewise, mention how Ork technology runs on belief and suddenly all Orks are Crazy Awesome man children who can pick up bits of piping and immediately shoot bolter rounds out of them.

Child Soldiers: Yet another way the factions in 40k violate the Geneva Conventions.

Space Marines are inducted at 10-14 and become Scouts by 15 at the latest. They have to be inducted that early because puberty interferes with assimilating the implants and children assimilate dogma easier than teenagers.

Cadian education and military training are the same thing, and they're typically full soldiers (which requires earning a medal) by some time in their teens, assuming they live that long.

Orks incubate in their underground wombs until adolescence and are ready to fight and kill the moment they break the soil.

Tyranids are also ready to rip your face off the moment they leave the womb, a fact the Tyranids often take advantage of by firing the wombs at planets.

Adeptus Mechanicus rituals appear like this to the casual in-universe observer. Tech-priests on the other hand are taught genuine mechanical skills, just in an odd and highly-ritualised way. Maintenence operations often include what appears to be unnecessary prayers, which may actually be machine control codes, timing routines, or mnemonic devices. Part of it may be due to machines having actual spirits and not just prepping the auto-systems of the Land Raider before things get worse.

Ork tech is more likely to work if enough Orks are around to believe that it will. If the Orkish consensus is that a red paint job makes a trukk go faster, then it goes faster after they slap enough red paint on it. Depending on the Writer this can range from "Ork Shootas never jamming in their hands" to "everything they make is scrap metal held together solely by them thinking that it works". It's more likely that the Orks have natural instincts to build things and their psychic gestalt covers the defects.

Clash of Evolutionary Levels: Invoked as the justification for Civil Warcraft for Tyranids (the other factions not really needing a reason to turn on each other): Tyranid fleets, being driven by an urge to consume everything they see and get the most adaptations out of it, will attack each other so that the fleet best suited for combat survives, the loser's adaptations and biomass serving the winner.

Two heroic Space Marine Chapters named themselves after ravens, the Raven Guard and the Blood Ravens. The Raven Guard are noted for emphasis on speed and tactical strikes (their Primarch was Corvus Corax, a contender for the least subtle Theme Naming in all 40K), and the Blood Ravens for valuing and seeking out knowledge and having many Librarians in their ranks.

The giant ravens of Kiavahr, the former chapter's homeworld, are intelligent enough to set traps and hunt Space Marine Chaplains who consider bringing their skulls home a point of honor.

The Chaos God Tzeentch has an association with corvids as well. One of his titles is the Raven God, and his Greater Daemons resemble large antropopmorphic birds. Such Greater Daemons are among the greatest psykers in the galaxy.

Chaos Helbrutes are similar, fashioned out of any usable metals and a suitable Marine to be forced into the machine that slowly becomes a living body of it's own.

Eldar Exarchs can't remove their armor once they've bonded enough with the spirits of their armour's previous wearers.

The souls of the rank and file Thousand Sons are trapped inside their power armor. They are called "Rubricae" after the Rubric of Ahriman that turned their bodies to dust.

Some Orks, only caring about war, will often pay the tribe's mekboy and painboy to have themselves sealed in a suit of mega armour. If that's not far enough, they can also be sealed inside a Deff Dread, a crude mini mecha. Gretchins are made into Killa Kanz who then proceeds to tear ass around the camp until it's taken down by a bigger Ork. Deff Dread pilots soon learn that it's much less a blessing at first glance while Gretchins are just happy to bully others around.

In times past, it was said that Khorne Berserkers' armour fused with their flesh, to the point that it would bleed when struck.

Chaos Marines who survive long enough can start having their power armour slowly bond with their bodies to varying degrees, thanks to the Warp. This has been described as thousands of small hooks finding purchase within their flesh.

The vast majority of Dark Eldar are tank-grown, with those born naturally being referred to as 'Trueborn' and their rarity granting them a position of prominence within their Kabal. Given the dangers inherent with Eldar reproduction (see Can't Have Sex, Ever above), it's believed the Craftworld Eldar employ similar methods of population upkeep. And since all Eldar are either pressed into service as Guardians or Kabalite Warriors...

Clothes Make the Maniac: Chaos-corrupted suits of armour. Granted, in most cases this is more a case of Clothes Make the Maniac Worse.

Most typical of the Inquisition — the torturers of other races usually have far too much fun to be called cold-blooded.

Interrogator-Chaplains of the Dark Angels and descendants. There's a reason they're named that. Especially be careful of the ones with many black pearls.

The Night Lords legion has a special fondness for this.

Cold Sniper: Vindicare Temple Assassins pack rifles and ammunition that let them take out tanks from absurd distances.

The Collector of the Strange: Chaos, the Orks, and the Dark Eldar collect the skulls (and occasionally other body parts) of their enemies as trophies. The Imperium collects the skulls of particularly pious servants for use as relics and Attack Drones.

Trazyn the Infinite collects items, people, and small locales of particular historic value. He take this trope almost to Supervillainous levels.

The Blood Ravens also collect artifacts of historical note, including weapons and wargear. Fandom takes it a few degrees further in terms of "collecting" items.

Colony Drop: Deconstructed, if you can believe it, but also used straight on occasion. "In close consultation with his advisors, Orkimedes determined that the best solution to the tactical flexibility of Imperial forces was to drop big rocks on them." A surprisingly common Ork technique to both deploy close to the enemy [in fact on top of a portion of them] and weaken aforementioned enemy.

Colour Coded Armies: Space Marine chapters, Chaos Space Marine legions, Eldar craftworlds, Ork klanz, Tyranid hive fleets, Necron tomb worlds, Tau septs: practically every major army has a set of color-coded subdivisions, and many of these have associated composition themes and stereotypes. Only the Imperial Guard defy color-based pigeonholing, and even they have certain color schemes they tend to favor.

Space Marines especially; many chapters feel that adding camouflage patterns to their armor would be "dishonoring the colors of the chapter," and intentionally dress in bright and highly-visible colors so that their enemy can see them and quake in terror at their approach.

Eldar are colour coded to the extreme. Not only does each army have their own colour schemes, but each DIFFERENT KIND of soldier has their own colours: orange for Fire Dragons, green for Striking Scorpions, blue for Dire Avengers, and so on...

The Thyrrus, a minor insectoid alien species, view war as a performance. They'll always seek heavy casualties on both sides, with lots of flash and spectacle. Their extremely advanced plasma-based weapons reflect this.

Lucius the Eternal is known to get extremely excited (and much better at fighting) on meeting a Worthy Opponent, but against Mooks, he enters a state akin to lethargic boredom.

Combat Medic: Space Marine Apothecaries, Ork Painboyz, and pretty much anyone else with a medkit or the equivalent.

Tau provide a Subversion. True, they may not believe in meatgrinder assaults and pointless Last Stands, but they avoid defending ground or melee combat. note OK, that may sound silly, but remember: the whole point of Combat Pragmatist is to be willing to do anything if it means victory. Even in real life modern armies, soldiers are taught basic hand-to-hand fighting techniques so they can hold their own if they're ever caught in a situation like that, but the Tau view melee as "barbaric" and refuse outright to do it. This bites them in the ass often seeing as how their primary enemies are the Orks and the Tyranids. The only Tau who does not think like this is Commander Farsight, go figure.

During the Great Crusade, Horus' forces ran into an alien race who had codified the art of war by having armies meet in huge arenas to prevent the loss of life. When the time came for battle, the humans were bemused to see the slaughterhouses half-filled with warriors, all looking to the sky. Horus quickly ordered a planetary bombardment from orbit.

The Iron Warriors are siege specialists - and the guiding rule of siege warfare is "whatever works, works". While they'll usually bring the big guns to bear no matter what, they'll also happily use infiltration, cannon fodder (including captured enemy troops loaded into expendable vehicles manned by suicide cultists), spies, traitors, secret passages, and other, far less pleasant means to crack open the fortifications and kill everyone inside.

Deconstructed by the Night Lords, who lack the conviction and valour of the other Astartes and so are a bunch of smug, cowardly bullies who love terrorising civilians and Guardsmen but fare horribly against foes like the Loyalist Astartes or the Eldar Aspect Warriors who aren't deterred by their terror tactics.

Comes Great Insanity: A rich tradition among leadership figures within the Imperium, from Horus to High Lord Vandire. Generally, reforms follow in their wake to stop similar incidents happening. For example, after the Horus Heresy, the Space Marine Legions were divided into smaller Chapters. In the case of Vandire, no-one was ever allowed to become both the head of the Administratum and the Ecclesiarchy again. And the Ecclesiarchy couldn't keep men-at-arms. Which they got around.

Commie Nazis: The Imperium mostly resembles the Third Reich: xenophobic, aggressively expansionistic, with a penchant for genocide and open contempt for "weak" notions such as peace, freedom or tolerance. The mind-numbing bureaucracy, on the other hand, is one hundred percent Soviet. And then there's the Imperial Guard Commissars...

Commissars: Fielded by the Imperial Guard in all their CommieNazi Bling of War (including the black and silverCommissar Cap). Their job is to inspire the Guardsmen under them with propoganda, riveting speeches, and battlefield bravado, but they also mete out harsh discipline, shooting the sloppy, the heretical, and the cowardly without mercy. In Dawn of War, this is not only a valid tactic but an essential one, as using Execute temporarily increases the firing rate of all nearby infantry. In fifth edition they will summary execute the squad's leader if the squad fails a leadership test; when assigned to command squads this can cause much more harm than good.

Commissar Cap: Trope Namer, and not entirely restricted to Commissars — a few regular regular officers and the odd Inquisitor wear similar hats, and some Orks love looting them.

Concepts Are Cheap: "The Greater Good" of the Tau is never explained, leaving the reader to fill in the details about what it is.

Confusion Fu: Chaos has this as their hat. There is only a 66% for any given piece to actually start the game on the board. This, and may other factors makes the Chaos faction the bane of any laid down plan from EITHER player.

A lot of armies practice this in one way or another, but from a more meta perspective many players do as well. For example, when young children get into the hobby, they often get a load of units that they think look cool (like the half-naked women wielding chainsaw greatswords) but don't really have much idea what they're meant for or what they're capable of. Other player may cobble together wonky new lists, or deliberately try to baffle you.

Continuity Nod: Forge World, Games Workshop's daughter company that specializes in producing resin miniatures for collectors and hardcore fans, has released a number of Space Marine miniature conversion packs designed to evoke the feel of old 1st and 2nd Edition models using the modern kits. Examples include the Land Raider Proteus (designed to evoke the old Land Raider model from Rogue Trader), the MkIc Deimos-Pattern Rhino (designed to resemble the 1st and 2nd Edition Space Marine Rhino, with its round smokestacks and dual bolters), and various special and heavy weapon packs crammed full of old-school guns.

Eldar Craftworlds are massive Generation Ships the size of dwarf planets, and hundreds of thousands of Eldar live comfortably on them. Also, Prince Yriel's personal ship, the Flame of Asuryan, is an Ace Custom Eldar Dragonship that serves him well as a pirate vessel. In fact, Eldar ships in general.

Necron vessels are just as badass. A few of their cruisers managed to sneak through Imperium space and threaten Terra itself. One even landed on Mars, which is probably the second most heavily defended planet in the Imperium. Notably, the Cairn-class Tombship, which is bigger and tougher than any human space cathedral, and carries a weapon which can Mind Rape the crews of said space cathedrals from thousands of miles away.

In stark contrast to the rusty, ancient space-borne cathedrals of the Imperium, the spaceships of the Tau Kor'vattra are sleek, shiny and every bit as advanced as they look. A notable example is the Custodian-class carrier, which is bristling with railgun and ion cannon batteries and contains launch bays for Manta dropships and Barracuda bombers.

The Phalanx is as large as a moon, and is the battle barge of the Imperial Fists.

The Thunderhawk gunship. Capable of functioning as a drop ship, a bomber or a ground attack vehicle, the Thunderhawk is the workhorse of the Space Marines, able to deliver up to 30 Space Marines into battle while also raining support fire onto enemy forces with their own deadly armament. It also has heavy ceramite armour, making it able to take as good as it dishes out.

The Imperial Guard Valkyrie. Armed with a Multi-laser and two Hellstrike missiles, while also able to deliver 12 Guardsmen to their target. Not as strong as the Thunderhawk, but as with many things in the Imperial Guard, the quantity more than makes up for the quality, and the Valkyrie can be upgraded with a number of amazing options. The Vendetta gunship swaps out the troop transport space for extra missiles and bolter gun emplacements, and swaps the multi-laser for three deadly lascannons, making it an unrivalled tank hunter.

What about the Imperial Navy Lightning? An air-superiority jet bristling with autocannons, lascannons and missiles. Its armament combined with its deceptive speed and agility make it a peerless dogfighter.

The Tau Razorshark Strike Fighter. Apart from the awesome name, the Razorshark is far more powerful and technologically advanced than any crude Imperial fighter. Its dual anti-gravity drive and jet propulsion system allow the craft to turn on a dime, and it possesses the ability to house interceptor drones.

Da Ork Fighta-Bommer. While admittedly no match for an Imperial, Tau or Eldar aircraft, the Fighta-Bommer remains a versatile and effective combat aircraft. Described as massive engines with a load of guns strapped to them, no two Fighta-Bommers are the same, with Meks constantly seeking to experiment and one-up each other with the latest designs. The Deff Skwadron have achieved near-mythical status for their impressive kill tallies and (relative) longevity.

Corralled Cosmos: Beyond the light of the Astronomican warp travel becomes effectively impossible for the Imperium. That would be good enough for any other setting but with 40k being what it is the light of the Astronomican is fading, meaning humanity's corral is shrinking.

Cosmic Horror Story: It's a universe where even death won't save you from an eternity of torture.

Cosmic Plaything: Humanity: we're something of a favorite species to mess with for the Chaos Gods, and pretty much everything wants to kill us for some reason, or no reason. The Eldar might also qualify, nearly getting wiped by Slaanesh, and always facing threats from everything else including the Imperium. Probably most everyone might fit into this except for the Tau, if only because they haven't been around long enough to. (It is suspicious, though, how they were able to evolve faster than possible while their planet was isolated by a warp storm.)

Costume Porn: The amount of accessories on a miniature would astound you.

Crapsack World: Every sentient race, including the gods, is made up of terrible people and is doomed. The 40K universe is so much of a crapsack that a new word, "Grimdark", was needed to explain how bleak the setting is. Bizarely enough, it's often zigzagged in the expanded universe. Ciaphas Cain reveals plenty of worlds that experience modern amenities of living (provided they're not being attacked by Orks/Tyranids/Eldar/Chaos/Necrons/whatever), even talking about a very active tourist industry. Gaunt's Ghosts shows brave men fighting to save their empire. And Word of God is that a lot of the sources of Grimdark are either propaganda or atrocities far apart.

Creepy Monotone: Necron Lords, and techpriests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Servitors are independently creepy and monotonous.

Creepy Souvenir: Many warriors keep skulls of their slain enemies, some in shrines, some carried around with them.

Crippling Overspecialisation: Meta-example; the Tyranids always had a gimmick of large, powerful Monstrous Creatures with high Toughness scores and multiple wounds. In come the Dark Eldar with their new codex full of mass poisoned (Toughness-ignoring) shots and weapons with the Instant Death rule, and...

Critical Failure: Imperial plasma technology is powerful but unstable and has a problem with explosively overheating. In-game, the "Gets Hot" rule covers this: models shooting plasma weapons take a wound on a To Hit roll of 1 and have to make their armor save, which is usually lethal for that model if the save is failed.

Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Ecclesiarchy is a Torquemada-era Roman Catholic Church in space, with the Emperor as its god. Oddly enough, the Inquisitors are not a religious institution, functioning more as State Sec.

Cthulhumanoid: Tyranid Lictors come with feeder tendrils by default, and they're an option for many other Tyranid units.

Cult: Plenty serving Chaos, and plenty of others devoted to the Emperor. At least one devoted to Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!

The Inquisition and Adeptus Arbites are pretty laid-back about culture, so long as planets revere the Emperor and pay tribute to the Imperium. However, if they see anything that could possibly be interpreted as a sign of Chaos, the purge will be swift and without mercy— and not all Inquisitors agree on what constitutes a sign of Chaos.

The Tau are all about this trope, even before their grimdark revision. All Tau (and their allies) must work, fight, and live for the Greater Good. Deviation lands you in a concentration camp. The Tau do not see it this way, though. According to the novelization of Fire Warrior, they see imprisonment-as-punishment as an (ironically) alien concept. Those who deviate from the right and just path are poor misguided people worthy of sympathy and help. If said sympathy and help involves some "tough love" in a re-education facility then so be it.

Curse That Cures: The whole point of worshipping Nurgle. If you are already covered in diseases and rotting flesh, you can't get old, and you won't feel pain. You also have the patronage of the only kind god in the entire galaxy.

Custom Uniform: Many examples for minor characters and squad leaders, such as Imperial Guard commissars and techpriests, and Eldar warlocks.

Cutscene Power to the Max: The differences in power between beings are drastically diminished in the actual tabletop game compared to the fluff — don't expect those greater daemons to kill whole worlds or the space marines to be a One-Man Army... or those lasguns to punch through concrete.

Lampshaded by a White Dwarf article that supplied rules for "Movie Marines", depictions of Space Marines based on the how they might appear in an in-universe war film. Basically turns every Marine into a Hive Tyrant and every Bolter into an Assault Cannon, and they're about 100 points each.

In the Space Wolf novels, Ragnar and co. fight off what we can estimate to be 40 odd genestealers in close combat. In-game, that many Genestealers spell a one way ticket to rending claw doom for anything short of a super-heavy tank.

Possibly literally in the case of the Adeptus Mechanicus. If the Void Dragon is beneath Mars, then it slowly eats the souls of those who replace their bodies with cybernetics. More cybernetics means more of the soul eaten.

The Obliterator Virus transforms Chaos Marines into a horrific amalgamation of metal and guns fused together with flesh and bone. Insanity is just the cherry on top.

If you're a vehicle pilot and you become a traitor, you'll suffer the horrific fate of being absorbed and permanently bound to your ride for all eternity. A pretty good example of this is to look at what happened to the Traitor Titan Pilots.

Cyborg: While there are "realistic" bionics, senior Mechanicus adepts often approach full-body conversion in their attempts to remove every trace of "weak flesh".

A more horrifying example are the servitors, catch-all machine-slaves in use for almost every imaginable purpose by the Imperium. After the events of the Dark Age of Technology, when the Iron Men rebelled against their human creators and nearly wiped out humanity in the process, true Artificial Intelligence was forbidden, ruling out the use of robots. Instead, the mechanicum uses "Machine Spirits" for larger vehicles and humans who have been lobotomized and upgraded with cybernetics (the servitors) for less critical tasks.

The Dark Side: Somewhat predictably, the setting takes this trope and hurls it off the deep end in the form of Chaos. The result? There's no Light Side — only a sort of Gray Side, and the actual Dark Side is sentient, extremely intelligent, masterfully manipulative, very powerful, and occasionally takes matters into its own hands when mortal pawns aren't getting the job done.

Data Pad: Whether Guard officers use "dataslates" or quills and parchment seems to depend on the writer.

Given the faded and forgotten supertech that underpins much of the Imperium, it's entirely possible that the (items that look like) quills and parchment are the more advanced option, again depending on the writer.

Days of Future Past: Feudal or Oligarchal planetary government is the order of the day in most of the Imperium.

Deadly Doctor: Mad Doks and Apothecaries are fully qualified and lethal combatants with their medical equipment.

Taken to extremes with the Terminator and Ravenwing Apothecaries of the Dark Angels. The former can take a missile launcher, Lightning Claws, or a Thunder Hammer. The latter is mounted on a bike with Flamethrower or Plasma Gun options.

Most Apothecaries do not display their role prominently, and thus they rather represent Combat Medic trope brought to its logical conclusion.

Dead Man Switch: The facilities imprisoning a planet's psykers before they can be carted off to Terra usually have one. In case of any trouble, all held psykers are instantly gassed. Considering how much trouble "any trouble" can evolve to when you deal with several hundreds of untrained and unsanctioned psykers, this can be considered a wise precaution...

Death of a Thousand Cuts: General Imperial Guard tactics — point enough "flashlights" at something and it should go down.

Death-or-Glory Attack: The Trope Namer is this game's Death or Glory Attack, a called maneuver in which a unit stands in the path of a charging enemy vehicle to squeeze a good shot off. Success means one-shotting a large enemy tank. Failure means you go squish.

Death Ray: Rays which cause death, rays which fire death, rays which eat death, and rays which are fired by Death.

Death Seeker: The Dreadnoughts of the Imperium are mortally wounded Space Marines kept on life support inside giant walkers. Referred to as "dead," they are typically honored to keep serving the Emperor. Chaos Dreadnoughts, on the other hand, feel trapped inside their walking tombs —the majority of them are incurably insane (even by Chaos standards), and prone to tearing friend and foe alike to pieces. The Defiler tank was actually created to fill the role that Dreadnoughts become too unstable to hold down once tainted.

Another example would be the Sisters of Battle's Penitent Engines, used only on people who have committed awful crimes (or are alleged to have committed them, anyway). You're strapped in and forced to look at images of your crimes 24/7. When the battle comes, you're told that death in battle will absolve you. Of course, they're also given 2 Heavy Flamers and a pair of Dreadnought Close Combat weapons, so they can also repent by killing everything in their paths.

In a horrifyingly perverted sense, Lucius the Eternal. Being a worshipper of Slaanesh, Lucius sees death as just another experience, especially when he's bested by a greater swordsman. What's different from other death seekers is that Lucius's death is not permanent, and he knows this. Whoever kills him ends up horribly mutating into him, a fact which he takes great delight in.

Death World: This is the official term used by the Imperium to designate Single Biome Planets of this description. They're depressingly common, but any native populations are automatically prime recruiting stock for the Imperial Guard or Space Marines — indeed, several such planets were colonized specifically to provide badass soldiers for the Imperium's armies. Rogue Trader characters who hail from a Death World get some serious stat bonuses, because even the biggest wimp from that planet still survived to adulthood on a world seemingly crafted to kill them. Some examples are:

Catachan, a jungle world where nearly every animal there is said to be a carnivore, and so are the plants, the majority of the microbes, fungi, and viruses. Wildlife includes the Catachan Barking Toad, a "jumpy" critter that detonates into a cloud of toxins that kills everything within a kilometer radius if you startle it, and the Catachan Devil, a cross between a scorpion and centipede the size of a train which is thought to be related to the Tyranids. Plus needle-shooting plants that turn any of their victims into more such plants. Every settlement fights a daily battle to keep its structures from being reclaimed by the vegetation, feral Orks breed in the deepest parts of the jungle, and on top of everything else the planet's gravity is slightly higher than normal. Living past the age of ten on such a planet is considered an achievement akin to graduating from boot camp, making the Catachan Jungle Fighters legendary among the regiments of the Imperial Guard.

Fenris, a world that is exclusively Grim Up North. Its elliptical orbit takes twice as long as Terran standard, which means its long winters freeze almost the entire planet, while its summers bring lava flows and tidal waves as the world passes close to its sun. The land is constantly changing, making permanent settlement impossible, and its resources are so meager that its population must war amongst itself to survive. Other claims to fame include kraken, dragons, and wolves the size of tanks. The Space Wolves wouldn't have their homeworld any other way.

The Blood Angels hail from Baal, an irradiated, mutant-infested, post-apocalyptic hellhole. They seek out similar worlds for training and recruitment purposes, such as an asteroid field orbiting a black hole where quakes can send mountains falling into the void and all sorts of evil nightmares lurk about, which is a thousand miles to the nearest neighboring asteroid. This make the recruits' transformations into the most angelic of Space Marines all the more miraculous, and may help explain the chapter's preference for shock assaults.

The Salamanders' homeworld is the binary planet of Nocturne, a rugged place of volcanoes, ash deserts and earthquakes, as well as fire-breathing reptiles the Space Marines take their name from. Every fifteen years the Time of Trials begins as Nocturne's moon Prometheus swings close, putting the already high seismic activity on overdrive, threatening every settlement save for the seven Sanctuary Cities. Afterward the planet is gripped by a long and bitter winter that covers the world in a frozen tundra, the only solace being the fresh veins of mineral wealth exposed by the cataclysmic upheaval. There is a reason the Salamanders fight more to preserve life than kill enemies: they know how precious it is.

The world of Urisarach was a storm-wracked planet covered in dense, hair-like forests, home to a nigh-extinct race of huge, armored arachnids dumped there because the monsters were just that unpleasant. It earned its nickname after a failed incursion that nearly wiped out an entire expeditionary fleet of Space Marines. As they put it: "This. World. Is.Murder."

All of these pale in comparison to Daemon worlds, planets which have been utterly corrupted by Chaos, where the laws of reality themselves are reforged at the whims of the daemons who preside over them. Mortals who live on Daemon worlds invariably live short and brutal lives as either warriors, slaves or playthings. The Daemon world of Drakaasi, for instance, is a Khornate planet presided over by a reptilian Daemon Prince named Lord Ebondrake and a cutthroat upper class of daemons, traitor Astartes, barbarian chieftains and amazonian warrior women, all fighting for slaves and the favour of their patron.

Decapitated Army: Played straight by the Orksnote because when the Warboss is killed the horde will dissolve into its component clans as his underlings fight to take over, the Taunote Ethereals are implied to use a kind of Mind Control to inspire and direct other Tau around them, and their deaths make the Tau react badly in one way or another and the Tyranidsnote because the army is controlled by giant synapse creatures to project the Hive Mind and when deprived of this Tyranid organisms return to animalistic instincts and turn on each other. Subverted quite spectacularly by the Alpha Legion when the Ultramarines went after them during the Horus Heresy; after (possibly) killing Alpharius and his top commanders, the Ultramarines were horrified to find that the Alpha Legion didn't give a shit about the death of their Primarch and pushed the Ultramarines off the planet with near-total casualties.

Defenseless Transports: Played straight for some armies, but subverted for others. Generally dedicated transport units tend to have less firepower and defenses than combat vehicles, barring the Land Raider (which can be taken as a dedicated transport for Space Marine Terminators but otherwise uses a heavy support slot like a "proper" tank), but how defenseless they are varies. Space Marine Rhinos have low armour and only a single storm bolter (a slightly longer range version a basic infantry gun), while Imperial Guard Chimeras actually mount fairly good mid-strength weaponry. And then you have the Eldar Wave Serpent, which is arguably one of the best battletanks in game, combining medium armour, high speed and good firepower.

Deflector Shields: Starting with personal infantry shields or shield drones and reaching up to Void Shields that defend Titans and starships.

Dehumanization: Imperials and Chaos have the same view of each other: blind fools clinging to false gods and weaklings only good for extermination. Some Space Marine chapters have this view of normal humans, whether allied or fallen to Chaos.

Tangentially used by the Imperial Guardman's Uplifting Primer. Of course their foes aren't human, but it still makes them out to be inferior to the basic human, and doesn't hesitate to make up "facts" like Tau being descended from bovines and stampeding at loud noises and Orks being easy to defeat in close combat. An updated edition features Tau sympathizers which it claims are easily recognizable as degenerate subhumans (other than a tendency to wear braids and sometimes paint themselves blue, they're no less healthy that the regular humans), reminiscent of Nazi sub-racial distinctions.

The Pain Glove, despite its name, covers the entire body. It's used to cause pain without damaging the body, and is extensively used by the (good guy) Imperial Fists chapter to continuously strengthen themselves or for spiritual reasons.

Demonic Possession: Even the tanks can get possessed. However, of the main sentient races, only humans are frequently possessed. Necrons have no souls to possess; whatever souls Tau have are too meager for demons to attach to; Tyranid hive fleets have such huge psychic signatures that anything lower than a Daemon Prince would be destroyed just going near them; Orks rely on a gestalt field rather than proper souls; the Eldar can avert it through strict discipline; and Dark Eldar torture a person a day to keep the daemons away.

Depending on the Writer: In a fictional universe this big, it can't really be helped, but there are tonnes and tonnes of factors that vary wildly depending on who's writing them.

The most notable is the Orks' Clap Your Hands If You BelieveAchievements in Ignorance — some writers have this being an irresistible force of nature, to the point where the Orks can fly spaceships with no fuel if they don't realize there is no fuel, whilst others go for the more moderate interpretation that Orks can fashion functioning technologies because they think they and thus their Gods work through them, and only take this factor as far as Red Wunz Goin' Fasta. Another notable one is the Imperium's stance on technological innovation — some writers say that any and all innovation is a burnable offence whilst others say that mixing and matching existing parts is acceptable provided one doesn't create new components from scratch.

This is a frequent response to internet discussions of the "who will win" within 40K. The winner will be the protagonists of the story, regardless of the connotations of their faction.

Official GW policy is that beyond the broad strokes each author gets to choose what counts as canon. "All of it is real, and none of it is real." Unreliable Canon is in full effect.

Determinator: The Necrons and Tyranids are entire races of Implacable Determinators, but insanely determined people crop up everywhere in this universe.

Non-race-specific example is any unit that has the "Rage" special rule, which force them to go after the closest visible enemy when they move, run, or charge, or the "Feel No Pain" special rule, which lets them keep going despite horrific injury.

One of the more extreme examples is Black Templars, who are the only army that movetowardsthe enemy when their men die. On top of this, they are literally fearless in close combat— a lone Neophyte (a warrior novice) who has just seen the rest of his squad die will stay in the fight against a monster three times his size, which just happens to have huge claws, acidic blood, head-bursting psychic powers and Emperor knows what else.

This is also true of Sisters Repentia in a Sisters of Battle army. Their zeal and will to repent is represented in their special rules, which attempt to ensure that they will always rush towards the enemy during their movement phase, and will always charge the enemy if they ever fail a Morale check in combat. Adding in a Priest only exacerbates the situation improves their chances of doing so.

On the Chaos side, the Khorne berserkers voluntarily undergo a partial lobotomisation that make them singlemindedly bloodthirsty and removes their inclination towards self-preservation. This means that they rush into melee brandishing chainsaw axes and are completely immune to morale effects.

Another notable example would be Commissar Sebastian Yarrick. Despite losing his left eye and his right arm, as well as being an old, old man by the time of his main exploits, Yarrick managed to inspire terror and respect in the Orks by his uncanny ability to fight in the thick of it no matter the odds (and the pain). When his right arm got chopped off he simply beheaded the offending Ork Warboss and kept on fighting, only "allowing himself the luxury of passing out" after the long battle was won. This has granted him the dubious honour of being WH40K fandom's answer to Chuck Norris, Jack Bauer and meme-makers know who else.

Played with by the Tau, who are physically unable to disobey their Ethereal caste leaders. If an Ethereal tells another Tau to do something, they automatically become the Determinator. If all nearby Ethereals are killed in battle, they tend to react... poorly, one way or another.

The Blood Angels Space Marines suffer from the Flaw, which turns them from noble warriors into blood-crazed, vampiric madmen. To date, only Mephiston, their Chief Librarian, has succumbed to the Black Rage, the final stage of the Flaw, and been able to return to sanity. He does it by sheer willpower.

During the events of the Horus Heresy, a World Eaters Space Marine known as Khârn racked up an enormous body count during the final siege of the Imperial Palace on Terra. He was killed during the battle, but Khorne, the Chaos God of war, blood and carnage, was so impressed by his showing that he brought Khârn back to life so he could continue to spill blood and collect skulls. It should also be mentioned that Khorne isn't particularly concerned about whose skulls Khârn collects, hence his nickname of "The Betrayer"

Typhus and the entirety of the Death Guard are an example. Stricken down with a terrible plague on their way to said final siege of Terra, the entire legion of disease resistant super soldiers is struck down by Nurgle... until Typhus makes a deal. Nurgle restores them to life, with the caveat that they will never be free of their diseases and must spend all of eternity bringing Nurgle's plagues to others.

Just in case you were thinking that was it, Lucius the Eternal of the Emperor's Children has this story. Renowned for both his arrogance and sadism, he was eventually slain, but his god, Slaanesh, approved of his debauchery so highly that he was returned to life, with the curse that anybody who dares kill Lucius will, if they take any pleasure in the deed whatsoever, be transformed into Lucius that he may live again.

The character of Ahriman experienced this. When Tzeentch picked him to be his herald of Change, he simply 'arranged' matters into giving Ahriman a lifestyle that suited him— just like he did when he brought the rest of his legion into his fold centuries earlier.

They're not always that hard to kill. An ordinary human took down one armed with nothing but a melta and a chainsword, while backed up by a squad of marines. Admittedly this was out of the ordinary, in a firmly tongue-in-cheek take on the universe, by a character who was both Born Lucky and a Badass Normal. Said ordinary human's aide also just so happened to be a blank, whose very presence is harmful to daemons.

In another amusing take on the rules, it is well possible that an entire retinue of an Inquisitor, whose job is banishing daemons, is unsuccessful, but a little girl with a kitchen knife can defeat a Daemon Prince(ss) without so much as a scratch (remember a Daemon Prince(ss) is a Chaos Warrior who proved so awesome and beneficial to her/his patron deity (s)he was granted demi-godhood).

Disney Owns This Trope: Games Workshop released an expansion called Space Marine to the original Adeptus Titanicus game (the scale now called Epic). Come the re-release, the entire game system ended up being released under the Space Marine name, with Games Workshop picking up a Registered Trademark for "Space Marine." Figures for Aliens will acknowledge this trademark on their packaging if you look, despite that Aliens came out the year before the original Rogue Trader book.

Similarly, the manual for Dungeon Keeper 2 lists "Dark Angel" as being registered under GW.

Dissonant Serenity: Some of the more beatific Living Saints of the Imperium can manage to pull this off.

Divided We Fall: Common among the Imperial armed forces, governments, the Inquisition, etc., much to the Imperium's detriment.

A non-sexual example of this trope: The Imperium, encouraged by the official state religion, the Ministorum, hates, fears, and persecutes psykers, even though the Imperium could not function at all without them, and even though the entire Imperium, under that same state religion, worships a psyker.

The Tactica Imperium is the most widespread manual of the Imperial Guard, with various compilations distributed all around the Imperium. Having started as a standardized work for the Emperor's vast forces raised in the Great Crusade, innumerable officers added their own thoughts to create countless more and more different versions including the mindsets and experiences of many different writers; making the entirety of the Tactica Imperium texts vast, potentially contradictory and variably interpreted. Basically, the Tactica Imperium is what religious canon would be like if the religion was a Church Militant ruling an empire across the galaxy.

Do Not Go Gentle: On a personal level, this is the entire philosophy of Gabriel Seth, Chapter Master of the Flesh Tearers. Unique among the successors of the Blood Angels, his Marines succumb to the Black Rage far more often than is normal, to the point that between it and losses in battle, the Flesh Tearers are slowly but surely going extinct. Seth has made it his life's work to ensure his Chapter is remembered as a force of gallant heroes and valiant warriors, rather than bloodthirsty monsters and psychotic killers.

Doomsday Device: Lots, in every form imaginable, from sucking planets into Hell to simply breaking them apart from the inside out. Bonus points to Chaos, who actually have an Apocalypse Datasheet (essentially a vehicle) called "Doomsday Device" that they can field, complete with Evil Overlord-esque instructions for fielding it.

More Ignorance Is Bliss. People who enforce this trope in-universe (High Lords of Terra, Inquisition etc.) are all but dumb.

The Ogyrns follow this with out even knowing it as they're the Imperium's Dumb Muscle of choice, with even their best and "brightest" bone'eads being a dull knife in a pile of shattered glass.

Dungeon-Based Economy: Whenever a Space Hulk appears in a system, it's usually followed by every local with a ship (and sometimes official factions like the Adeptus Mechanicus) to enter and loot the millenia-old technology. This is extremely stupid, as hulks are often used by tyranids and orks as transportation devices, making them aware of an inhabited system to eat/plunder nearby.

Humanity. However, the Imperium is so large that it will take thousands of years for them to finally die out, and they're numerous, stubborn, and heavily armed enough to take at least some of their killers down with them.

The Craftworld Eldar are a vestigial empire with a very low birth rate due to the fact that attempting to reproduce runs the risk of being tainted by Slaanesh.

Necron are literally incapable of reproducing, since they're souls in mechanical bodies. While they're very hard to permanently kill, they can't replace any losses.

While the game has remained fairly consistent in theme and tone from 3rd edition onwards, First Edition (also known as Rogue Trader) and Second Edition were very, very different from the modern game. The game began as something much closer to an RPG (as opposed to its current status as a miniatures strategy game) and included a Gamemaster. The game didn't take itself particularly seriously (it was Warhammer In Space and the developers happily embraced that idea) and had loads of tongue-in-cheek references. Second Edition moved the game closer to its current state mechanically, and somewhat in terms of background (many fundamental aspects of the current lore and factions were established either in those days, or in very late First Edition), although it was still significantly more lighthearted than the eventual tone the game would take, and it was famed for having Loads and Loads of Rules (fires were persistent and you had to check what happened to them each turn, vehicle crew could be affected by shooting and could act to replace injured crew members or try and repair an out-of-control vehicle, so on and so forth).

Keeping with the Warhammer In Space theme, Eldar were originally called "Space Elves", while the now-defunct Squats were known as "Space Dwarves" and Orks were more commonly referred to as "Space Orcs". There were also Space Slann, and Space Skaven were rumoured for a time, though never implemented.

Space Marines were originally something akin to a galactic police force. Their armour was covered in crude slogans and they were sometimes given names that alluded to pop culture of the day. The armor was different (fairly birdlike, which still exists in canon as Mark 6 "Corvus" armor), the bolters had the magazine right behind the barrel, and Marines also had more Starship Troopers influences along the Space Knights theme - there were even some Space Marines who were brainwashed criminals.

Back in the Rogue Trader days, the Adeptus Arbites weren't expies of Judge Dredd. Instead they were a shoutout to a different sci-fi franchise. The Arbites were described as sword-carrying men who went barechested and wore a mask and a cloak with a colour darker than black.

The Tyranids originally carried separate weaponry, instead of having it as part of their bodies. They also had a semi-diplomatic slave race at their beck and call (the infamous Zoats). In addition, they were much more stick-like - though they still have obvious Xenomorph influences, they weren't as pronounced as post-Starcraft Tyranids.

Genestealers were originally separate from, and not related to, the Tyranids.

Early editions featured a fifth major Chaos God, known as Malal, who was eventually dropped from the setting due to legal troubles.

All twenty Space Marine legions were originally known. Two of them (the Valedictors and the Rainbow Warriors) would eventually be changed to later foundings.

The Imperium was known to have Space Marine jetbikes; these would later be restricted only to the Eldar before eventually making a comeback for the Horus Heresy series.

There were a few xenos that never came back — aside from squats, there were the Piscean Warriors/Saharduin, ugly barracuda/shark freaks.

On an out-of-universe note, the models from the game's early years are basically Early Installment Weirdness incarnate. It's fairly clear Citadel was still learning their craft, as the poses are awkward and some of the models look distinctly goofy, particularly when stood up against their modern incarnations.

Easy Logistics: Averted in the novel Helsreach, which takes place during the Third War of Armageddon. It takes three whole pages for the POV character, Grimaldus the Black Templar, to go over everything that's talked about for the nine days before the war starts. He even abridges it; going over the Imperial Guard numbers for the city alone takes two whole days.

Played with. Earth (aka "Holy Terra") is the undisputed capital of the Imperium of Mankind and site of both the all-powerful government that runs it and the psychic beacon known as the Astronomican, which is absolutely necessary for humanity's faster-than-light travel to work reliably. It is however always displayed on the left side of any galactic-scale map, so the majority of the galaxy is counted as "east" of the solar system.

Averted for most of the non-human races, for whom Earth is just the place those Puny Earthlings call "home", but played oddly straight for the Tyranids. That Astronomican we mentioned? That humans use as their faster-than-light beacon? The Tyranids can see it too. And they want to eat it.

Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Just about every large Imperial vessel is equipped for Exterminatus, the cleansing of an entire planet, which is often employed at the mere suspicion of heresy. Then there are the Eldar Akliamor, the Planet Killer, the Blackstone Fortresses...

Then later explained in the Tabletop games. The Imperium actually does NOT equip most of their heavy capital ships with planet-killing weapons, for fear that somebody other than the Inquisition will wind up using them. The Inquisition has special ships built for the purpose, imaginatively named Kill-Ships.

That being said, a mid-sized fleet packs enough massive guns that it could probably break up a planet with sheer weight of fire, if it wanted.

Earth That Used to Be Better: By the time of the start of the Imperium, the oceans are gone, siphoned off and boiled away, and large swathes of land are rendered inhospitable (at the very least) due to pollution or fallout from historical nuclear wars. Although it's the seat of the Imperium, much of it between the arcologies and hives are lawless wastes. By the present time of the Imperium, Earth, as seen from orbit, is a huge cityscape swathed with dirty brown clouds, much of which is agglomerated pollution, and most of the many billions of people live in terrible squalor under the eyes of the uncaring overlords who use Terra as their various headquarters.

This is the overall strategy of the Tyranid Hive Fleets, what isn't eaten in battle will eventually be broken down and absorbed after all resistance is annihilated.

In early editions, a bad roll for a Shokk Attack Gun (a gun that sends tiny goblins into a tunnel through hell, popping out completely insane and frenzied inside the target) meant that the pilot of the targeted dreadnought or Terminator knows how to react to the sudden apparition of a crazed snotling next to his head, voiding itself in his ear: turn his head and take a big bite, resuming the battle as if nothing had happened.

Elite Mooks: Elite choices for armies. Some elite choices are powerful warriors with specialized equipment, and others are basically better versions of Troop choices, and they consequently fit the spirit of this trope better. Space Marines have Veterans, Imperial Guard have Stormtroopers, Orks have Nobz, Eldar have Dire Avengers note Okay, okay, they're a Troop choice, but they're functionally standard Guardians with better shuriken catapults and tougher armour, Dark Eldar have Trueborn, all Chaos Daemons all have elite variants, the list can go on. Fits lore, too: Space Marines are viewed as this compared to the other Imperial forces, the Imperial Guard and PDF, who do the bulk of the fighting... and dying.

Embarrassing Tattoo: Oddly enough, by Lukas Bastonne. A very-decorated sergeant of the Cadian Shock Troops with eidetic memory, who is incapable of forgetting the soldiers who have died under his command. The narration of his background describes him as having tattooed his body with the names of all the said soldiers as a momument to them even if his impressive memory ever fails him, and descibes it greatly in a way that implies it true, but prior to that states it's a rumor and mentions his high-collared and tightly-pressed uniform, which would certainly be hiding it well if it were true.

The Tau Empire has a few skeletons in its closet. The Imperium of Mankind has entire mausoleums. To go further, since they inadvertently created an entire Chaos god, one of the most terrifying forces in the Galaxy (and in this case, the Squickiest of the four), you could say the Eldar have an entire necropolis. The other sides also have dark histories; they're just more honest about them.

Almost each of the Space Marine chapters have at least enough secrets to fill a tomb or two. Special mention goes to the Dark Angels, who are more than willing to kill members of the Inquisition to hide their secret (which is similar to killing a judge at your own trial) and are so secretive about it within their own Chapter that it would make Happyology seem like an open book.

Empowered Badass Normal: The Sisters of Battle used to be nothing more than power-armored nuns with guns; better equipment and training aside, they were just ordinary humans like the Imperial Guard. Recent Sisters lists have weaponized the Sisters' faith, allowing them to manifest battlefield miracles that protect them from enemy fire and further increase their combat prowess.

The End of the World as We Know It: This age of mankind has been dubbed The Time Of Ending, since it is believed that humanity will either be extinguished, or it will evolve into a brand new species.

For Chaos, the Imperium likes to believe that because it's the nature of Chaos to fight itself when they aren't occasionally united by a common goal, being the reason why the mortal forces tend fracture during or after a major offensive. While sometimes true, the real reason is that Chaos forces are often a collection of discreet warbands and cults with their own goals in mind and no real authority to answer to. They don't fracture as much as it's the nature of Chaos, as much as it's politics.

For the Imperium, while nominally united, it's not uncommon for forces to meet each other on the battleground. The reason can be that one side justifiably believes the other has turned renegade or traitor. Other times they have conflicting goals and are unable or unwilling to talk it out (the Dark Angels, with their extreme secrecy and priority on hunting the Fallen are rather infamous for being prone to this). Sometimes it's local political reasons, sometimes it's the ambitions of one commander for glory or for a vendetta that causes him to take his force against other Imperials.

The Tyranid Hive Fleets have been observed fighting one another when they encounter each other. The Hive Mind actually encourages this, as the better adapted Hive Fleet wins and takes the loser's biomass and agglomerated genetic information, thereby strengthening the race as a whole. As a bonus, the winning swarm loses no resources from either side other than the time spent fighting these wars (any ammo, troops, or ships lost on either side get eaten up and recycled into more).

For the Dark Eldar, it's a cultural standard to go just shy of this, since the Kabals are focused on scheming against and subverting one another rather than resorting to outright warfare. Obviously, they do engage in this when Kabal relations heat up.

For Orks, this is actually the standard way of life for clans and tribes to fight one another in the absence of other enemies. Until an aspiring Warboss pops up and butts enough heads together to form a Waaagh! to fight against other enemies. Accepted strategic doctrine for other races is that the simplest way to defeat a Waaagh! is to kill the Warboss, and then the Orks' unity will dissolve into old rivalries and they'll start infighting again.

The Eldar are normally highly adverse to this trope as befits their Dying Race status, but thanks to the vague and open-to-interpretation nature of Eldar prophecy its not unheard of for Farseers acting independently of each other to spark off conflict.

The Greater Good - the overarching philosophy of the Tau Empire - was explicitly created to avert this and, thanks to a maybe-pheromone link to the Ethereal Caste, the main body of the Tau empire is refreshingly free of Tau-on-Tau conflict. The sole exception is the Farsight Enclaves who have broken ranks with the main empire after losing their Ethereals to a demonic incursion. Open conflict is fairly rare, but the main Empire considers the Enclaves to be highly threatening to the cohesion of the Greater Good.

It's a way of life for the Orks; the only thing that can put a stop to Orkish infighting is another, more enjoyable enemy to stomp.

Occasionally, two factions will work together to destroy a common enemy, and may even give each other a few minutes to run when it's all over. In-game, the Allies table codifies this with the "Allies of Convenience" and "Desperate Allies" conditions, which translate to "working together until we don't have to" and "working together but spending as much time watching each other for betrayal as watching the enemy".

Equal-Opportunity Evil: Chaos accepts/corrupts everyone, regardless of species, though the main races are, in general, conveniently resistant or immune — Eldar know how to resist, Tau have next to no Warp presence, and Orks and Tyranids too reliant on their native psychic fields to be easily corrupted by the Warp. The Necrons have contractual immunity, given that they are robots without souls and have technology that nullifies the effects of the Warp.

Although Chaos Orks do appear, particularly stormboy kultz. However, the Orks have a natural aversion to Chaos and corrupted warbands are almost immediately wiped out when they run into some of their uncorrupted kin, who will kill them off for being "un-Orky".

The difficulty with corrupted Orks (and, to a lesser extent, Tyranids) is that it's very difficult to tell the corrupted from the non-corrupted. They'll both try to kill you with abandon.

Ironically, one of the few positives of the grim darkness of the far future is that traditional forms of discrimination, such as racism of the non-fantastic kind and sexism, are almost non-existent. As long as you are human, or at least human enough, you will be treated equally. Equally poorly.

Establishing Character Moment: The stories and legends about the Primarchs, semi-mythical figureheads of the Space Marine legions, and the Emperor nearly all involve some establishing moment from the Primarchs first actions after being born (normally slaughtering hordes of aliens) to the first meetings between the Emperor and the Primarchs which will say something important about how they saw him or why they betrayed him.

Eternal Engine: Adeptus Mechanicus Forge Worlds are described as being planets covered in these. Or as planets that are these.

Lesser known fact: the entire Warhammer 40,000 universe and all its depressing crushing grimdarkness, from the wearisome toiling of factory serfs, the endless struggle of the Imperial Guard against overwhelming odds, the callous judgement of the Inquisition, the fiery fanaticism of the ecclesiarchy, the malevolence of the chaos gods, to the plots of the necrons and eldar and all the rest is just volumes upon volumes of set up for the fact that there are Mad Scientist Space Orangutans zipping around.

Everything Is Online: Wherever the Mechanicus is given free reign, they set up a noosphere network, which is an odd combination of augmented reality and massive electronic intercommunications, and appears most commonly as auroral streams and clouds of data. The catch is that one has to be properly augmented to see them. In the context of this trope, it's mostly averted with Mechanicus protocols and the rarity of the technology needed to crack the noosphere, though specialist sorcery originating from the Dark Mechanicus can have... adverse effects on the noosphere.

The Evil Army: The forces of Chaos, the Dark Eldar and the armies of the Imperium on a bad day (or under a bad leader).

Evil Counterpart: Chaos Space Marines to Space Marines, Lost And The Damned to Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar to Craftworld Eldar, although the latter only appears that way from the outside. Some Craftworld Eldar see their Dark brethren as not so much "evil twin", as just a Jerkass sibling. The "Great Work" of the Harlequins is to reunite the two factions; not necessarily through any major change either factions' lifestyles.

The Chaos Gods could be seen this way too; Slaanesh as a corruption of Love or Happiness, Khorne as a corruption of Bravery or Glory, Tzeentch as a corruption of Hope or Wisdom, and Nurgle as a corruption of Acceptance or Friendship.

The Imperium of Man who wants to destroy all Xenos and the Tau Empire who wish to convert everyone to "The Greater Good" whether they like to or not.

Renegade Marines and some Traitor Marines enjoyed the freedom that came along with not having to work for the Imperium any more.

This is pretty much Slaanesh's thing. To a lesser extent, the Chaos Gods attract followers who are naturally drawn to the way of life they offer, and thus the way of life they would likely enjoy the most.

Dark Eldar do all of the horrible things that they do halfway out of need, the other half because they legitimately enjoy the fruits of being twisted sociopaths.

Orks are hyperviolent brutes because war is literally their favorite hobby.

Chaos — Many creatures of chaos have long prehensile tongues and various other features covered by subtropes.

Nurgle — The Great Unclean Ones have exposed organs, use their intestines as weapons, use vomit and pus as ranged weapons, etc.

Slaanesh — Daemonettes have big crab claws in place of one of their hands, and are rumored to have a nasty surprise instead of normal genitals. Keepers of Secrets are a mix of many different body parts, including breasts.

Tyranids — Everything.

Evil Overlord: Every Chaos Lord, Dark Eldar Archon and Ork Warboss, and about half of the Imperium's governors.

Just about anything corrupted by Chaos becomes this, often the only way to remove it is to destroy the planet.

A variation with the orks: a planet that's been invaded once will pretty much always have them, since the way they reproduce is by releasing spores on death that float around and eventually mature into even more orks (these are known as feral orks, and have a lower level of technology than the regular kind), though using fire to dispose of their corpses helps a bit.

Evil Will Fail: Comes up a lot when dealing with Chaos and the Orks. Tzeentch would die if his plans caused the destruction of the mortal realm and he knows it, so he often sabotages his own plans and makes them mutually contradictory - it's a testament to his sheer unnatural bastardly that none of his myriad schemes ever work even by complete accident. As for the Orks, their hostility which makes them such a threat also means they will never unite under one banner, and any alliances between Orks are purely temporary as it is inevitable that they will fall back into squabbling once their Warboss dies (and he will, if not by the hand of a challenger than by a weapon malfunction, a freak buggy accident, doing something silly like riding a missile...)

Referenced in the background material, as a wave of anomalous energy radiating out of the Eye of Terror raised the birth rates of psykers and mutants across the Imperium. The implication being that humanity is now evolving into a psychic species, and the mutants are an unfortunate side-effect. Under normal circumstances this would make zero sense whatsoever, since simply being a psyker is much more perilous of the average person due to the dangers of Daemons and the Imperium itself. Evolutionarily speaking, the "psyker species" should die out before it is even born. That said, anything having to do with the Warp, psykers, and the will of the Emperor can't be considered normal circumstances.

40k also has an aversion which is completely ignored in the fluff. Humans have, by the 40th century, evolved around several divergent paths. Astropaths (at least in much older fluff), Ogryns, Ratlings, Beastmen and Squats are (or were for the latter two) distinct species that were offshoots of Homo Sapiens adapted to different environments and specializations. "Mutants", capital M, were listed as a sub-species along with all the other examples, but the concept of a species entirely made of mutants doesn't really work scientifically.

Navigators are effectively a human subspecies with exotic psychic powers and a physiology that gets increasingly bizarre as they age. They are born with a third eye quite unlike the other "natural" two as it sees directly into warpspace rather than the physical world. As they age and grow in power, they start gaining mutations that make them look less human and more otherworldly. Many humans (justifiably) consider them to be mutants, but Navigator are tolerated and even given a privileged place in the Imperium; because rather than a random aberration, their were deliberately created by genetic engineering during the Dark Age of Technology. And Navigators are indispensable when it comes to navigating the Warp.

The major genetic evolution in humanity has been the emergence of psykers, and even then they're around one in a million. Somewhat enforced, however, in that FTL travel is far from easy: the populations of planets become known for very particular traits (every Catachan looks like Rambo and the Predator squad) and there is little opportunity for interbreeding. The other major modification, which involves taking the cloned genes of a long-dead superhuman warrior and injecting them into a human until they're seven feet tall and bulletproof also makes them sterile.

This is actually averted with the various "Abhumans" who sometimes show up as Imperial Guard auxiliaries. In contrast to the various mutants created by Chaos energies and genetically altered supersoldiers, Abhumans are new races who have evolved naturally on planets with different environments than Earth, most notably the Squats, who evolved on a high-gravity planet.

It should be noted that the primary STC tank of the Imperium is of extremely basic design, so much so that the things can be adapted to run on wood with minimal adjustments. Steam is a relatively popular form of power in many tanks, especially considering the availabilities of particular fuel types can vary wildly in an empire that's lost count of how many planets it contains.

Played With, as most weapons is the setting are exotic or amazingly cool, but are standard issue and became blasé.

Every army has a laundry list of Relics, many of them are powerful, one-of-a-kind weapons. One of the weirdest was for the Skitarii, and it was allegedly the skull of Nikola Tesla wired up to emit an EMP.

Daemon weapons are usually seen in the hands of a Chaos Lord, who's the only one strong enough to earn it and crazy enough to use it.

Force Weapons are a psyker's best friend in hand-to-hand, and the only ones able to turn a fancy but otherwise normal weapon into a lethal killing tool.

Witchblades are swords and spears available to Eldar psykers, and are nasty weapons in a fight.

Followers of Nurgle and Slaanesh enjoy this trope. Plague Marines can take biological weapons that should outright kill any other user, and Noise Marines use devastating sonic weapons that amplify their screams.

Dark Eldar love this trope. Wyches use exotic gladiator weapons to show off their skills in close combat. Archons have access to a slew of bizarre and strange weapons to show off the wealth and skill needed to acquire them. The Haemonculi covens have all sorts of weapons that work like twisted medical equipment or artifacts that seem to work like magic.

Actually averted with the 30K World Eaters. Sergeants and commanders have the option of taking Caedere Weapons, melee weapons that were lifted from Angron's gladiator days. Most of them were based around gimmicks and situational bonuses, and a consensus was formed by the base that most of them were simply inferior to regular power weapons, and possibly even the good ol' chainaxe which World Eaters got for free.

Amusingly, this went full circle, with the Judge Dredd movie featuring Judge Hunters who brazenly ripped off the Adeptus Arbites uniforms, which themselves were ripoffs of the original Judge uniforms.

The Imperium of Man is a fairly convincing expy of the Roman Empire taken Up to Eleven: the Imperial government is known as the Administratum, the Space Marines were formerly divided in to Legions, and the order to destroy a planet is known as Exterminatus.

It's also an expy of Dune's Galactic Empire. The Imperium even has a God-Emperor and a class of mutated transhuman hyperspace navigators.

And where then expied back to Warhammer. Tyranids before release of StarCraft look very little like Zerg, while Tyranids released after StarCraft...

Commander Farsight was a prominent leader of an Empire's military forces. He eventually led some of his brethren in a rebellion against the powerful ruling cast, whose whims most Tau serve their entire lives. He is also known as O'Shovah.

This is used as a vital means of transportation for the Imperium and Chaos forces. The problem with this sort of FTL travel is that they have to travel through the Warp, a twisted alternate dimension where the Chaos Gods and their many daemons reside, meaning it's not uncommon for a ship to get lost, arrive way off target or off time, or suffer a malfunction that would expose the ship to the Warp and the crew to a fate that would make them envy the dead. This is usually less of a problem for Chaos, who use forbidden knowledge or daemonic pacts to mitigate the risks, but that doesn't quite make them immune to it. Those ships that get lost or destroyed in there usually become Space Hulks, massive patchwork shipwrecks that drift about in space.

The Webway is a labyrinthine alternate dimension used by the Eldar which has an oblique connection to the Warp (some sources say that it's built across the warp, some that it's built right on the border, etc.), however some sections have been completely lost or blocked off due to breaches into the Warp, a lack of maintenance, or the Necrons invading. However, it's home to it's own category of strange creatures, locations, and phenomena. The Dark Eldar have their main city of Commorragh in it, as it's the only place where they're relatively safe from the attentions of Slaanesh. The Harlequins are rumored to be headquartered at the Black Library which is also hidden somewhere within. While much of it has been lost, the Webway still allows access to millions of locations across the galaxy.

Dark Eldar Mandrakes exist in a kind of shadow dimension that allows them to pop back into realspace from people's shadows.

The Tau have no psychic ability and thus no ability to see the Warp. Their FTL is therefore achieved by putting the ship into the space between realspace and the Warp, reaching lightspeed, and coasting out (the effect is directly compared to holding a ball underwater and letting go). While much safer, it's also around five times slower than Warp travel.

Extreme Omnivore: Tyranids eat everything up to and including entire planets, right down to the bedrock, including the atmosphere.)

Space Marines, due to their various enhancements, are also able to survive by eating things most people wouldn't consider food.

The Kroot eat anything they can so near future generations will take on certain aspects. They also digest EVERYTHING they eat, to make up for the few things they don't.

Extreme Speculative Stratification: Hive cities are homes to millions if not billions of people, who are richer the further up you go. Since hives are often the only habitable places on a Death World, the richest live in the upper atmosphere that's actually breathable, while the poorest have to fight off mutants, giant spiders and each other, feeding off the waste that gets dumped from higher strata. Unsurprisingly, the Imperial Guard recruits heavily from the scavenger population, since surviving to adulthood is no easy feat (and often have other useful skills, like scrounging or a highly-developped sense of 3D direction).

Faceless Goons: Most troops are either alien monsters or wear full-face helmets, but most squad leaders and superior officers don't, to make them stand out more. While the idea that men in suits of Powered Armour the size of tanks are running around with their heads completely exposed leads to some serious Fridge Logic, Word of God is generally that the characters do wear their helmets, but the models representing them don't to make them more distinctive. (Actual fluff is interesting on this front. At least in the case of Astartes, their skulls are just as tough as any helmet could hope to be, and their augmentations render them immune to most poisons and diseases (though, this being 40k, there are always higher levels of lethal, but a helmet would do squat against those anyway). The only reason to take a helmet is for the Autosenses suite, which is far more useful for shooting than for combat. As characters prefer melee....

It should probably be noted that, in the case of the aforementioned Powered Armour wearing tank-sized men, being shot in the exposed skull is generally seen as a fairly minor inconvenience, both in-game and in fluff terms.

Space Wolves will deliberately defy this trope, as in their Space Viking culture it's not enough to single-handedly take down a giant monster with nothing but your bare hands, someone needs to see you do it. That, and they feel deafened while wearing the helmets, due to their heightened senses. As we mentioned earlier, helmets are only good for enhancing the senses of the wearer- if a marine's senses are equally good without, no reason to wear one, especially as it restricts smell.

Fainting Seer: Imperial Psykers with prophetic abilities tend to go a bit... quibbly when particularly world-shattering events, like Black Crusades, Tyranid invasions, or Ork WAAAGH!s are about to happen. Naturally, since this is 40k, the side effects are sometimes more messy and permanent than simple fainting.

Fallen Hero: Every Chaos Space Marine. Some (the original Traitor Legions) in a vast Chaos-inspired collective rebellion known as the Horus Heresy, ten millennia before the setting; some (Renegades) later, for various reasons. Even most of the Chaos Primarchs were once noble heroes with genuinely sympathetic backstory, and some, such as Magnus and Fulgrim, have particularly tragic reasons for their descent into damnation.

A particularly tragic example is the Fallen Angels, a group of Dark Angel Space Marines who were tricked into siding with Chaos during the Heresy, and are mercilessly hunted and tortured by their loyalist brothers.

Horus himself is the most prominent example at hand. An incredibly talented, charismatic and powerful leader, Horus was, essentially, tricked into rebelling by being shown a future where (so he thought) he had been forgotten (along with all the other traitor primarchs) and the Emperor was worshipped as a God. Ironically/tragically, this was in fact that future that his very rebellion would create.

Fangs Are Evil: Averted with the Space Wolves and the Blood Angels. Played horrifically straight with Chaos Space Marines and the Tyranids.

Fantastic Naming Convention: The Tau Empire as a whole have a fascinating naming convention for their citizens, using [Caste]'[Rank] [Sept they were born in] [Defining traits]. For example, Shas'la T'au Kais means "Brave Fire Caste Initiate from T'au".

It's right there in the Imperial Creed. "Beware the alien, the mutant, the heretic." Yet despite the Jerk Justifications that have been raised in the Imperium's favour to justify it, the overall mood of the Imperium's take on xenophobia is a deconstructive one. The Emperor became this after seeing how many if not most of the allied alien races humanity had worked with prior to the Age of Strife turned against them after their fall, enslaving and killing them in great numbers. He decided that the galaxy was not big enough for his vision of humanity and these existing Xenos empires. But he took their legitimate beefs with certain races and twisted them into a carte blanche that justified, in his mind, anything humanity did to any other race in the future. To this day, humanity has a shoot-first-ask-questions-never approach to aliens, including those who are pre-spaceflight and pose no threat to them; for instance, they were prepared to bomb the Tau out of existence when they first encountered them despite the Tau being barely out of their Iron Age. The Emperor was also not above presenting Xeno races he deemed useful to him with Join or Die offers that included a non-negotiable obligation to accept humanity as their overlords, nevermind that that was exactly the kind of behaviour he had bitched about aliens doing to humanity. Humanity may have many enemies in the galaxy that cannot be negotiated with, but their hyper-aggressive foreign policy hasn't done them any favours with other species. Aliens don't hate the Imperium because they're humans; they hate them because to them, Humans Are Bastards.

Seems to have ebbed slightly as of the Dark Imperium storyline, where the Eldar of the Ynnari Cult intervened directly to revive Roboute Guilliman and are actively seeking to forge a lasting alliance between themselves and the Imperium. They firmly believe that the fates of the two species are irrevocably linked, and must either unite against Chaos or be extinguished separately by it. Time will tell if Guilliman and the Imperium proper are receptive to the idea.

Speaking of whom, the Eldar have this problem in a big way as well, and it is also deconstructed. Their monumental arrogance has led them to direct threatening alien forces into Imperial or Ork-held systems to save their own people's lives, even if the number of Eldar being saved is a fraction of the other people being killed in the resulting throwdown. They also greatly underestimate the capabilities of non-Eldar fairly often, which has come back to bite them in the ass more than once.

Fantastic Rank System: The Imperial Guard have several additional ranks, such as "Lord General Militant" and "Colonel-Commissar". Non-human factions have entirely invented rank systems; see the trope page for details.

More generally, the Imperial Guard (Astra Militarum if you want to avoid a copyright) are patterned roughly off of WWII British ranks, with several additional fictitious ranks added above the typical pones to reflect the colossal size of the Imperium, and Soviet political officers appended to it, plus entirely made-up psychic ranks beside those.

In the Imperium, "twist" is often used for mutants, though the mutants have largely reclaimed the term.

Also, members of the Imperial Guard have used the term "cogboy" for Adeptus Mechanicus Techpriests.

The Eldar refer to humans as "Mon'keigh". The fact that it sounds like "monkey" is the least offensive thing about it note Translated from Eldar, it means something like "lesser being to be exterminated"..

The Tau term for humans is less blatantly insulting, but is still quite condescending if one is versed in their language. Their standard term is "Gue'la", which, apart from it sounding like the Chinese slur for Europeans (gwailo) doesn't seem that bad. However, their term for humans who have joined the Tau Empire is "Gue'vesa", which translates as "human helpers", clearly highlighting their status as second-class citizens. It's also worth noting the only other categorical use of the suffix -'vesa is in reference to their mindless robot servants who have the same level of intelligence as a rodent.

Space Marines in general are based off of the famous Greek Spartans. More specifically, we have the Viking Space Wolves, the Mongol White Scars, the Roman Ultramarines as the most obvious examples. Blood Angels have some Christian iconography, particularly from the Renaissance period (in the form of immaculate angels). Dark Angels have a particularly monastic feel to them, reinforced by their Old Testament-style angelic names. The Dark Angel's Death Wing Company also has a sort of tribal feel to it, due to the history of their armor, and the Ravenwing, with their huge, wing-like standards and emphasis on rapid assault, are dead ringers for the famed Winged Hussars of Poland. Black Templars are likewise based off of The Knights Templar and The Teutonic Knights, which also affects their gameplay. Prussia is also present in the Imperial Fists, whose attitudes and methods of sovereignty are straight out of the junker playbook.

The Iron Warriors are based on the Spartans (their homeworld Olympia is described as impossibly mountainous) except they show what happens when a Proud Warrior Race goes mad.

The Inquisition shares a lot of imagery with (surprise, surprise) the Spanish Inquisition. The Witch Hunters are also very obviously based off of the witch hunters from movies, and possibly the Salem Witch Trials.

Imperial Guard regiments include the World War II German-inspired Steel Legion and the rather more Grimdark World War I German-inspired Death Korps of Krieg, the fur-hatted Russian Valhallans and Cossack-based Vostroyan Firstborn, the Arabic Tallarn Desert Raiders, the Vietnam War-themed Catachan Jungle Fighters, the Prussian-esque Mordians, the pith-helmeted, red-coated Praetorians, the tribal Attilan Rough Riders (just guess), and the Welsh/Scottish Tanith First-and-Only.

The Cadians are intended to be your standard modern/futuristic soldiers but their name is supposedly a reference to Canada's underappreciated army; their accents in Dawn of War seem to back up that theory. They are also influenced by Blitz-era Britain— Lord Castellan Ursarkar Creed is basically Winston Churchill in Space, cigar included.

In the Dawn of War series, the Tau are characterised by distinctly Asian accents, which rather coincides with their Taoist philosophy and rather Animesque designs. They're also commonly seen as Space Communists for their "Greater Good" philosophy. Interestingly, though, their military doctrine of rapid movement, fluid battle lines and overwhelming force backed by drones, long range precision weaponry and laser-guided destruction (minus the battlesuits) is absolutely American.

Both the Necrons and the Thousand Sons Chaos Space Marines show ancient Egyptian influence in their design.

The Kroot have a very Aboriginal Tribal feel to them, using relatively primitive weapons and warbeasts rather than the high-tech weaponry of every other race (and it's not like it's hard for them to get the equipment either, they just simply don't want it because it's too flimsy).

Fashionable Asymmetry: Tau Fire Warriors wear an over-large, reinforced shoulder pad on their left shoulder to provide additional protection when they open fire on the enemy. Some older patterns of Space Marine power armor have a studded, reinforced shoulder pad on one side for the same reason.

Fast-Roping: A tactic that was introduced in the Cities of Death expansion that allows troops to drop directly onto buildings from their skimmers. Later adopted as a standard— if dangerous— technique for exiting a Valkyrie at speed in Codex: Imperial Guard.

The Chaos Gods' selfishness which is why cooperation between them is impossible.

Fate Worse than Death: Being captured alive by Dark Eldar. Sure, the end result is the same (death), but it may take years of being tortured just for fun.

A Father to His Men: Literal in the case of the Emperor to the Primarchs and the Primarchs to their respective legions during the Great Crusade. Also see the image on that page for much lulz.

Surprisingly, Nurgle's Great Unclean Ones are described as Fathers to their Daemons. The Lord of Decay Nurgle himself even engenders a twisted affection in his followers, who refer to him as "Grandfather Nurgle".

Fear Is the Appropriate Response: Any unit with "fearless" will fight to the death, despite the casualties they take, and cannot be pinned by enemy fire, however they would continue to fight even against the enemy they cannot possibly hurt, until it rips them to shreds, where more reasonable warriors would at lest try to retreat to fight something more suited to their capabilities, and they also cannot go to ground under heavy fire, which makes them more vulnerable to being focus-fired.

The Federation: The Tau Empire, who ironically would be the bad guys in most settings. In 40k, they're the idealistic ones.

Feed It a Bomb: As of the Sixth Edition, greanades now have a seperate strength-stat that is used when fighting Monstrous Creatures; that's right, even the Mighty Carnifex, practically impervious to Strength 4 Bolters, can be taken down by a unit of humble Tactical Space Marines, all tossing a once-humble (Strength 6) Krak Grenade down its Toughness 6 throat...

Feudal Future: The Imperium, Ork empires, and Saim-Hann Craftworld being the most prominent, though most interstellar organizations eventually exhibit shades of this. Justified in all cases by slow and unreliable interstellar communications and travel.

Fiction 500: Anyone who has a "Warrant of Trade" in the Imperium is this. The poorest of these trades has to do with a single space cathedral attached to a battle ship, while the richest owns entire fleets and controls the trade of hundreds of planets.

To the point that the rogue chaos god Zuvassin is, for the most part, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Murphy's Law; he doesn't so much as give his worshippers orders as much as just let them loose, because if he actually were to give orders, they would find some way of messing them up.

Final Solution: Exterminatus is a disturbingly popular problem-solving tool.

Five Rounds Rapid: In background material, trying to take down Warp-spawned horrors with conventional weapons usually achieves nothing, and alternativemethods must be employed. Generally averted in the tabletop game; even greater daemons and star-gods can be hurt, but can take a hell of a lot of punishment.

On the tabletop, Five Rounds Rapid is ineffective. Five Hundred Rounds Rapid, on the other hand...

Star-gods and a few nasty T8+ creatures are utterly immune to most small-arms fire in-game, due to the rule that if a weapon's strength is 4 or more less than the toughness of the target, it can't hurt them (and the standard firearm is usually Strength 4, if not less). They also have a helluva lotta wounds to withstand anything that can hurt them.

Crossing this trope with Every Car Is a Pinto, the Hellhound Flame Tank can suffer a catastrophic explosion even to a mild hit as a result of its flamer tanks going up.

Flat-Earth Atheist: The Tau, whose lack of warp sensitivity and general inexperience and naivety makes them doubt stories of daemons and other warp-spawned horrors.

The Horus Heresy novels have shades of this in places too — the Emperor has promoted a society based on atheistic secularism, so people lend absolutely no credit to stories of Chaos Gods being behind the various Bad Things that happen for the first few books. Justifed because the Emperor is a Nay-Theist trying to stave the Chaos Gods of worship and belief to destroy them. It doesn't work.

Flechette Storm: Eldar shuriken weapons, Dark Eldar splinter weapons, and at least one type of bolter shell all work like this.

The Tau have an upgrade for their tanks that shoot flechette storms while using tank shock rules.

Similarly with the Land Raider variant patterns (Crusaders and Redeemers): They have Frag Assault Launchers, which shoot a cloud of shrapnel outward from the front assault ramp, allowing those within (usually Terminators) time to close with the enemy.

Fling a Light into the Future: Make no mistake, 40k taken at face value is a horrible, depressing setting in which all of the various factions, good and bad, are going to annihilate each other leaving a dead, ruined galaxy in their wake. However, some of the most powerful and human moments in the series are when a small group of Astartes, guardsmen, or even civilians decide they absolutely will not give up, and fight to the last for duty, honor, to live one more day, or even for the very survival of their species. The so-called "hero" races of 40k often lose, and many times their hard-won victories cost thousands or even billions of lives, but their refusal to give up in the face of such ludicrous odds is awesome.

More specifically, this was the Emperor's intent with the formation of the Grey Knights Space Marines. As the Imperium was being torn apart by the Horus Heresy, he sent his closest adviser, Malcador, to assemble what would become the Inquisition and the Grey Knights.

One unbreakable shield against the coming darkness, One last blade forged in defiance of fate, Let them be my legacy to the galaxy I conquered, And my final gift to the species I failed.

If Tyranid fleet enters your system, then immediately turns around and gets the hell out of there, it's a sign that you should pack you stuff and follow their example, as the only thing they run from are the Necron and you're sitting on top of a Tomb World which may have just awakened from the backlash of hive fleet entering the system.

For Doom the Bell Tolls: The Bell of Lost Souls is located atop one of the highest towers of the Imperial Palace, and tolls once whenever a truly great hero of the Imperium dies. It is said to be audible on the other side of the planet.

It is hinted at in the fluff that the bell tolls for every Space Marine that died in service to the Emperor. More accurately, it's stated that, "...[the bell] would toll itself hoarse were it to ring for every Space Marine that falls in His name."

For Science!: Guiding star of the Adeptus Mechanicus, though their definition of "scientific progress" is tracking down and recovering ancient relics. That's the only difference; the Mechanicus will go to any ends to recover even a fragment of a STC device, no matter the cost. The Logician cult from Dark Heresy takes this creed even further, often with horrifying results.

The whole franchise strives to be as mindbogglingly terrifying as it can for no f**king reason!

Foregone Conclusion: For the story, no matter what new threat shows up and no matter how much its power is hyped it will never mean the end of the Imperium. Similarly, there is no way any of the other factions will be permanently defeated. In real life, whenever an army gets a new codex they will definitely win the battle report in the White Dwarf magazine or at least a second chance if they lose the first battle.

The Eldar are working on it. Only three of their gods Isha, the Goddess of Healing, Cegorach, the Laughing God and Khaine, the God of Murder survived the fall in any way. The Eldar's endgame is to create a fourth god— Ynnead, the god of death— from their fallen. So in this case, their fourth god is quite literally death.

Friendly Fireproof: Averted Trope — weapons of the Blast variety can hit allies, and single-target ranged attacks are not allowed to target enemies engaged in a melee with allies due to the possibility of hitting their own troops.

Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: The Blood Angels are pretty decent people. However, don't get near them when the Black Rage takes effect as they start getting Ax-Crazy and literally bloodthirsty when it takes effect.

From Bad to Worse: And how! The 5th Edition of the game has taken this even further, fleshing out the history of the past few hundred years— the Time of Ending— and revealing just how monumentally screwed the Imperium actually is. Although, given this is 40k, with loose ends such as the prophesied return of the missing Primarchs, the Alpha Legion, various Eldar contingencies and the possible rebirth of the Emperor via the Star Child, it's unlikely any faction is going to gain total victory.

Just when fans thought things couldn't get any worse for the Imperium, along came 8th Edition. To put it short, Abaddon's Thirteen Black Crusade resulted in a stonking win for the forces of Chaos: Cadia's been blown up, and the Imperium has been fractured into two, with much of Segmentum Obscurus (the galactic "north") and Ultima Segmentum (the galactic "east") lost in an "Imperium Nihilus". The Astronomican in the Nihilus is obscured and many important worlds such as Baal, Mordian, Valhalla and the Gothic Sector are isolated and besieged. The Imperium is trying desperately to reestablish control with the help of the newly awakened Primarch Guilliman, but things have never been bleaker.

Frontline General: An actual game mechanic, as the minimum to play is two units of troops and a general / HQ unit. Depending on their stats, you either keep them the hell away from attack (see Tau Ethereals) or are horrifying death machines to be rushed into melee as soon as possible (orks, some Chaos leaders). In the fluff, however, the less insane armies keep their high command well out of harm's way.

"Body Gloves" are a general term in-setting for form-fitting one-piece wardrobe elements, with both military and civic applications. Some of them are valued for their ability to be worn under other clothing, which is especially useful if the fabric of the body glove contains unusual properties or pockets for inserting form-fitting armor plates that need to be discreet.

Imperial Assassins wear uniforms that are quite literally sprayed on: the substance (called SynSkin) comes in large aerosol cans and provides whole-body protection from various airborne toxins and temperature variation whilst allowing the skin to breathe properly, but only if applied directly to naked flesh.

Gameplay and Story Integration: One of the appeals of the tabletop game is that any army can be pitted against any army and still be faithful to the story and setting. note Yes, even Tyranids versus Tyranids if you try hard enough, though admittedly this is the biggest stretch, at least until Cain's The Greater Good came out. . After all, in the Crapsack Universe the 41st millennium is, a given battle could feasibly be happening somewhere.

Gameplay and Story Segregation: No matter how absurdly powerful each faction is made out to be in the fluff, they are all brought down to some level of balance on the tabletop. Even the Space Marines, the biggest badasses in the universe, become the Jack-of-All-Stats infantry units.

The Imperial Guard have an odd case of this. The novels based around the IG state that >90% of the time, they are fighting other humans (rebels, cultists, mutants, etc.) and actually have a reasonable chance of success doing so. However, when the more powerful armies are disproportionately represented on the tabletop, with Space Marines (both types) being the most popular, it's not hard to see how the Imperial Guard gets its reputation as a Red Shirt Army that loses horribly almost every time.

The stats of the humble Bolter and Chainsword would surprise anyone who was familiar with them, but not the game. The Bolter is described as basically a rapid firing RPG launcher, but in-game is little more than a powerful slug thrower and not all that intimidating. The Chainsword is a Chainsaw in sword form, so you'd expect it to have some effect on enemy armour, right? Not so much. It literally has the same stats as the "butter knives" the Imperial Guard uses.

Also ties into Power Creep, Power Seep as, in the earlier editions, the Imperial Guard were suppose to be baseline, with other races compared to them for what was "elite". This is a holdover at the time from Warhammer Fantasy, where stuff like toughness 3 and 5+ armor on a rank and file soldier would be a godsend. This is most notable with the Eldar, who are suppose to have "elite" infantry in heavy armor that can run about unhindered (represented by having 5+ armor and the fleet rule). This, of course, was completely screwed up with Space Marines being the most popular and populous army, so they became the baseline, resulting in everything in the fluff being rather skewed when compared to the tabletop.

In fact, the Primaris Marines seem to have been conceived, from a gameplay perspective, of restoring the feeling of superhuman warriors to the Space Marines, as they play much like Marines function in the fluff.

Gang Initiation Fight: Becoming a full member of the Space Marines includes a fight against current members, although applicants are not expected to win, they are judged on how well they do.

This is actually a fairly rare means of admission and few chapters use it. After ten years of training and surgical implants, there's not much point in being initiated in a way that could take you out of circulation.

Garrisonable Structures: Tabletop 40K was doing this long before Video Games did. In the case of more "open" buildings such as ruins, typically the general terrain and cover rules are used, but in the case of more "closed" (as in it is hard or impossible to place models inside of them) structures, more abstract rules exist for determining how many models can fit inside, where the fire points are and how many of them there are, where the entrances and exits are, etc.

Gatling Good: Consider the Assault Cannon, a gatling gun which can cut through light vehicles. Next, consider the Punisher Gatling Cannon, a gatling gun the size of a main tank cannon that can slaughter entire squads of light infantry at a time. Then the Vulcan Mega-Bolter, a gatling gun the size of a whole tank that can mow down armies. Now look at the Hellstorm cannon, a gatling gun the size of a skyscraper. And that's just in the Imperium. Yep, 40k likes this one.

After being exiled into the Webway, Aurelia Malys ran into a crystalline entity and defeated it, ripping out its heart and her own and exchanging the two. Now that the crystal heart beats instead of her own, she has minor precognitive abilities and complete immunity to psyker powers, which she uses to plot the downfall of Asdrubael Vect, who caused her exile in the first place.

Eldar Farseers slowly turn to crystal as they age due to their connection with their Craftworld's wraithbone (the psychically-active material used by Eldar for their armor, weapons and buildings). Eventually they retire to a special area of the Craftworld where their spirit joins the Craftworld as their body continues to turn into wraithbone.

Abbadon the Despoiler was this until recent codices retconned the goals of his thirteen Black Crusades from simply "invade the Imperium" to "secure important objectives and resources while launching relatively small assaults against Cadia to bleed the Imperium of much-needed resources and destablise it even more".

Generic Doomsday Villain: The Tyranids are the original for the this, with no established backstory, and aren't likely to get one since they've been around since the early days and still haven't gotten one, no characters with personalities, there' just Horde of Alien Locusts that devours everything they see with no goal given. GW then decided to have another with Necrons, who while having a scary backstory, they were ultimately just another faction bent on killing everything in a game that already had one, led by Jerkass Gods that were kinda rehash of the Chaos Gods as far personalities went. Since their recton they've become more interesting, but the Tyranids are unlikely to ever change. Some of the earlier Tyranid fluff implies that the reason they're invading our galaxy is because they're fleeing from something even worse. Think about that for a moment.

Genetic Memory: Space Marines and Tyranid Lictors have the ability to absorb the memories of the dead by eating their flesh, particularly the brain. In addition, each Space Marine Chapter is based on the genetic templates of one of the Primarchs, and occasionally display traits and memories of that Primarch. Blood Angels, for example have a random chance of triggering the genetic memory of their Primarch's bloody death, which can drive them into an Unstoppable Rage. Kroot are said in designers' notes to have gained Ork technology through their ability to absorb the DNA of prey.

In fact, according to one version of their backstory, the Kroot started out as fairly ordinary birds, aside from their ability to absorb DNA and evolved into intelligent, humanoid lifeforms by scavenging dead Orks.

The Hive Tyrants take this to the logical end by being able to retain their memories in death, allowing them to learn from their mistakes for when they fall in combat. The ultimate example of this is the fabled Swarmlord, which is implied to be the only unique Tyranid among the hivemind; its consciousness and memories are beamed across the galaxy at a moment's notice when its tactical acumen is needed, and a fresh body is grown for it. Once its purpose is fulfilled (or if it's killed) its consciousness and memory are beamed off to another body.

Genius Bruiser: A wide variety, although who, why and to what extent vary wildly depending on the setting. Of particular note, perhaps, is The Emperor, who is/was clever enough to construct his own Webway Gate, design Space Marines, and command the Great Crusade, and was badass enough to kick the crap out of pretty much anyone in the setting. His Adeptus Custodes and Space Marines are a close second— in particular, the Tech Marines, and anyone Space Marine who survives long enough to gain some experience (notably, Dante of the Blood Angels, Logan Grimnar and Bjorn the Fell-Handed of the Space Wolves). Each faction has their own representatives, as well— Fabius Bile, various Mekboyz (though they have more of the bruiser than the genius about them, they are a damn sight smarter than the rest of da boyz), most Inquisitors, various Eldar... the list goes on.

Genre-Busting: It doesn't matter if the tropes the series uses are from Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror, or whatever, as long as they make the setting Darker and Edgier.

Geo Effects: Placing units in or behind pieces of terrain can greatly increase their chances of survival thanks to various rules for movement, shooting, and close combat.

Giant Spider: Giant robot spiders, no less, in the form of Necron Canoptek Spyders, and a Humongous Mecha-scale variant called the Tomb Stalker, which is more of a Giant Centipede. The Tyranid Hierophant biotitan has elements of this as well, combined, of course, with reptilian features.

In a similar vein, Death Cult Assassins. These are lithe and acrobatic girls in gimp suits wielding a pair of power swords. And disturbingly, they are not considered to be actual Imperial Assassins. Why? Because they are literally from random unsanctioned cults that are dedicated to murder, with the belief that it pleases the Emperor in some way (unsurprisingly a lot of these cults eventually fall to Khornate worship). In essence they are literal murderous fangirls.

The Jokaero combine this with Lethal Joke Character. They wear technomagic rings on their fingers that fire beams that can do three different types of ranged damage, but they die just about as easily as you'd expect unarmored space monkeys to.

Taken to extremes by the joke army build known as the "Barrel of Monkeys"note Take Inquisitor Coteaz, who can take Jokaero as troops. Spend all the rest of your points on Jokaero. You will murder your way across the tabletop, provided you keep up the pace and not give the other guy an opening because the second you do he'll turn you into Swiss cheese.

Most rank and file units that cost more than 25 points tend to be this. You wouldn't think a Grey Knight or an Assault Marine, being clad in what is essentially tank armor to be glass cannons, but their relative cost means that while they have decent survivability, you're going to feel every one of those losses as the opponent can simply outnumber you in bodies (which in turn may bring more attacks to the field).

God-Emperor: Read through the page and if you can't guess who it is by the end, we'll give you a cookie. We'll even give you a clue: his name begins God- and ends -peror, and despite ascending to literal godhood after his reign ended due to the worship of the masses he is so totally not aDune rip-off.

Ironically, the guy tried to make sure that he wouldn't ascend to godhood. It didn't work. Far worse than he would publically admit to liking.

Tzeentch: Chessmaster god of change, mutation, manipulation, sorcery, Magnificent Bastards and the long game. Daemons take the form of mutated horrible things which squirt hellfire from every orifice; followers are usually mutated-beyond-all-recognition sorcerers, or automatons reduced to dust sealed inside armour. Odds are high that everything going on in the entire galaxy is part of his Gambit Roulette. Reflection of the emotion of hope.

Nurgle: God of decay, disease, corruption, entropy, maggots and Body Horror. Daemons take the form of potbellied maggotridden monsters of barely-held-together rotten flesh, mortal followers aren't much better. Apparently has a sense of humour, and is called Grandfather Nurgle by his followers, who see him as a kind and loving god. Born from the emotion of despair.

Khorne: God of rage, violence, war, oversized weapons and the Axe-Crazy. Daemons take the form of spiky muscular freaks covered with blood and brass, usually holding really big axes. Followers are uniformly psychotic axe-waving Blood Knights, although this may be something of a Flanderization— earlier background material described Khorne as the god of martial prowess, not just blind, screaming bloodlust. Khorne embodies the emotion of rage.

Then we have the C'tan, who are almost as good as the Chaos gods themselves on the soul eating and reality warping front.

Khaine, the most powerful of the surviving Eldar gods, is as much a psychotic murderer as a warrior and protector.

The God Emperor of Mankind, a fascist overlord who reunited humanity by Curb Stomping everyone not agreeing with him being in charge, who qualifies as less evil.

In life, he conquered by diplomacy or economics whenever he was personally in charge, or at least preferred those approaches. The perception that his regime was exclusively focused on ass-kicking is mostly tied to the public regarding the psychic warriors he artificially created to delegate the combat to as his 'sons' and 'heirs', even though thinking about it for half a second should tell them that an immortal and unkillable being has no need or desire for either. This makes his betrayal by his manufactured servants exceptionally tragic, since even the loyal side of the civil war betrayed everything he stood for by putting his own legacy purely in terms of violent conquest and enforcing his worship as a god.

Subverted (finally) with Isha, the Eldar Mother Goddess. She's been Nurgle's prisoner for centuries, and he tests his plagues on her, learning something when she cures herself. When Nurgle isn't looking, Isha whispers the cures for these diseases to mortals.

Gods Need Prayer Badly: Played with, The Emperor of Mankind thought the Chaos Gods worked this way and tried to starve them of worship. Except they exist as embodiments of emotion and do not need direct worship (although it doesn't hurt). However, due to the nature of the Warp trillions of humans worshipping the Emperor as a god empowered him beyond his already considerable psychic power.

Despite getting Flanderized to being a solution for any problem, Exterminatus is actually treated this way within the canon. While the Imperium is willing to sacrifice millions of lives in a single war, even they hesitate to completely destroy a habitable world. The situation must be beyond hope of salvage or victory. Anyone who is found to have declared an unwarranted Exterminatus will likely be executed.

Sometimes, factions who are so mutually opposed that working together would be an absurd idea find themselves having to team up to fight a mutual foe. In-game, this represents the "Come the Apocalypse" level in the Allies tables; these factions have the same restrictions as the "Desperate Allies" level but cannot start the game within 12" of each other. As an example, in the 7th edition rules all Imperial factions are at this level with Chaos factions, Necrons, Orks, and Tyranids, while they are only Desperate Allies with Dark Eldar and Tau and Allies of Convenience with Eldar.

Gold-Colored Superiority: The Blood Angels chapter use a predominantly red color scheme. The Sanguinor,◊ an angelic psychic manifestation called "the Exemplar of the Host", is almost entirely gold.

Bad Moonz Orks certainly consider themselves superior, paint their stuff yellow, and are the only Orks to decorate in gold (mostly because all the other Orks notice that it's soft and stop caring about it).

Gone Horribly Wrong: The Rubric of Ahriman, cast by the Chief Librarian and his Cabal, was meant to protect their brothers from the terrible mutations of Chaos and Tzeentch. It did... by turning all of but (at most) 100 Thousand Sons Marines into dust and sealing their souls into their armor. The Rubric Marines are now nothing more than groups of Animated Armor controlled by Sorcerers

The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: Or rather, The Bad, The Evil, and The Really Really Evil. The Tau and Eldar Harlequins are the Bad; the Imperium, Craftworlds, Necrons and Orks are the Evil, and the Tyranids, Dark Eldar, and Chaos are the Really Really Evil.

A few specific chapters and factions, such as the Salamanders and the Space Wolves, could legitimately be considered Good.

The Salamanders fight not for glory, but for the people. Hurting civilians is a Berserk Button for them, which a chapter master found out the hard way. Outside of that, they're ruthless in battle and are an entire chapter of scary black men who like to burn things.

The Space Wolves, an entire chapter of Chaotic Good Boisterous Bruisers who are scary enough to convince the Inquisition to change its operating policy.

Tau rule can seem restrictive to people not accustomed to it, but the Tau inhabitants like it quite a lot. Even the humans are probably better off than they would be in most other places.

The Eldar. A race of psychic Space Elves with hyper-advanced weapons who have dedicated themselves to fighting the genocidal Necrons and the forces of Chaos. Unfortunately, they're also douchebags. Not total douchebags, though.

"Good Luck" Gesture: For some Imperial troops, "thumbing one's palm," or planting the thumb of one hand in the palm of the other to produce an eagle's wing of sorts. This represents the aquila, the two-headed eagle used as the Imperium's insignia.

Good Taming, Evil Taming: In Warhammer 40,000, the techpriests believe that while they get machine-spirits to work by observing the proper rituals and giving them the respect they deserve, the orks merely threaten their machines into working. The limited AIs (and the fact that their machines work without requiring hours of rituals and incantations) used by the Tau confuse them, and some try to entreat Tau tech by offering the xenos machine-spirits reverence.

Goomba Stomp: A popularly depicted maneuver in the fluff is for jetpack-equipped assault troops to come down directly on top of their victims. This has predictably devastating effects as the individual performing this attack is either a half-ton Space Marine, a massive Tau battlesuit or a really, really crazy Ork. As of 8th Edition, it's finally manifested as an actual rule with Primaris Inceptors, who are not only even more massive than a regular Marine, but are wearing a jetpack equipped form of their already ridiculously heavy Gravis armor.

The Codex Astartes, written by Primarch Robute Gulliman as a foundational document for the training and doctrine of the Space Marines after the terror of the Horus Heresy. Comprehensive in scope and application, the Codex is used by the vast majority of Space Marine Chapters as their primary manual. Just how closely you should follow the Codex remains a bone of contention both in-universe and among the fans.

Greater-Scope Villain: The Chaos Gods are the best example of this in the fiction. Many of the horrendous atrocities in this setting are either done in their name or to deny them victory, yet they're on such a higher order of existence that their involvement said atrocities could be compared as a passing glance.

The Imperium itself is this to the Tau Empire, a fact which the Tau themselves are only just barely beginning to become cognizant of. The Tau have 12 major "Septs"; worlds with populations in the high millions or greater and serving as cultural hubs for the Empire, scattered across a few hundred lightyears. By contrast, the Imperium covers roughly 80% of the entire galaxy and has millions of such worlds, being bog-standard Imperial or Hive Worlds that can be wiped out by the dozen and the greater Imperium doesn't even notice. For final, damning comparison, the whole Tau Empire occupies part of a single Imperial Sub-Sector, of which there are tens of thousands. A few Tau have learned exactly how massive the Imperium is compared to them, nearly all of them have been driven to madness or suicidal despair at the monstrous scale of what they previously assumed was a fairly equal opponent. Indeed, the Tau regard the Imperium as their Arch-Enemy, the Imperium is almost totally unaware the Tau even exist.

Greek Letter Ranks: The psyker rating scale goes all the way from Alpha Plus (can snap a Titan in half with their mind) to Omega Minus blanks (invisible to daemons and cause immense suffering to psykers just by being present due to their having no Warp presence). Baseline humans are Rho or Pi.

Particularly tough versions of individual Tyranid strains are referred to as Alphas.

Grim Reaper: The Nightbringer is the Grim Reaper of 40k, a hooded, scythe-wielding omnicidal star-god who gave all creatures (except the Orks) the fear of death. A lot of others in the universe like to style themselves after the ideal of the hooded reaper, including Eldar Dark Reapers and their Phoenix Lord Maugan Ra, various Dark Angels, the Death Guard primarch Mortarion and a few of his champions.

Guns Akimbo: Cypher and Sisters of Battle Seraphim, mostly. Dire Avenger Exarchs can have this too. As of 8th Edition, Primaris Marines of the Inceptor discipline also get in on the fun. A few old, 3rd edition-era Chaos Marine models are constructed this way, though in their case, it's purely for visual flair and has no function on the tabletop.

Imperial bolt pistols, a few human stub pistols, plasma pistols, and inferno/infernus (melta) pistols, particularly the versions wielded by Space Marines. Ork sluggas also qualify. Other races tend to be a bit more... restrained when it comes to their sidearms.

Laspistols technically count; while las weapons in general are some of the weakest weapons in the 40K setting, by real world standards they are incredibly powerful, capable of severing limbs and causing massive explosive tissue damage.

Hand Wave: In all the years of the game, there's never been an attempt to explain why the Emperor can't make a new generation of Primarchs. The usage of the "we can't make more Primarchs" excuse, helps to contribute to the sense that there won't be any more progress in the Imperium.

Hanlon's Razor: Almost always inverted — never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by malice or conspiracy.

Aversions abound, but there is one straight example: the Chapter Serfs of the Space Marine Chapters. They fill all positions in a chapter not involving leadership or infantry combat, and are better trained and equipped than any non-Astartes. The Space Marine Chapters, in turn, recognize the skill and dedication of their serfs, and chapter serfs are full members of the chapter cult, and enjoy a better lifestyle than all except the richest citizens of the Imperium.

Some Dark Eldar willingly submit themselves to other Dark Eldar for torture and humiliation. This has less to do with them enjoying it, and more with the fact that they're just that jaded with freedom.

Happy Ending: No, seriously, in this grimdark setting, there are stories with happy ending. The problem is it's either an Esoteric Happy Ending, or that one happy ending is just the starting chapter of another story.

A group of Orks came to a Daemon World looking for a good scrap, and got killed for it. Then they found out that everyone on the planet is fated to fight daily until they get overwhelmed, die, and be resurrected the next day, ready for another fight. Definitely the best afterlife ever for Orks.

Fulgrim's backstory had him stranded on the barren wasteland of Chemos. He swore to change it all, and through various his efforts, productivity slowly increased until Chemos citizens could finally enjoy the finer luxuries of life once abandoned for sake of survival. Within 50 short years, Fulgrim was then the undisputed ruler of Chemos, who turned the dying planet into a shining beacon of prosperity. An unambiguously happy ending for the people of Chemos, definitely. Unfortunately for them, they're just prequel characters of the horror that will be known as Horus Heresy.

The tyranids are ravenous insect-like aliens whose only purpose is to break everything into biomass and devouring it. As such, nobody really wants them around, so much so that in the new edition's ally rules, which measure each faction's willingness to cooperate with each other, the Tyranids have absolutely no allies.

Pre-5th edition retcon, the necrons (undead robots) existed only to scour the galaxy of every single living thing down to the last bacterium. Nowadays they can be negotiated with.

Orks. WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!

A downplayed example with vanilla Humans, who are simply taught to fear and hate aliens as a default. Played straighter with Space Marines, who are brainwashed to hate and kill anything that isn't human on sight. Any exceptions that occur with either of these groups either involve unusual circumstances, or is otherwise considered a grievous breach of ethics and warrants punishment.

Chaos Daemons exist only to kill and corrupt the denizens of realspace.

Other Chaos groups have a striking tendency to always be fighting or preparing for it when they aren't forced to exist covertly. Even each other. Especially each other

Ork Doktors (Otherwise known as "Painboys" or just "Doks") have a delightful tendency to "eksperiment on da subjekts" when they are given their "anastetiks" (IE. knocked out with a hammer). To quote the book "An unfortunate ork who goes to the Dok to have his toothache fixed might wake up with a set of lungs that allows him to breathe water instead!!"

This is also how healing magic works for the forces of Chaos. Healing comes from Nurgle, the God of Plagues. It isn't so much "healing" as cancerous growths filling up the space left by the wound.

Elves vs. Dwarves: Everyone with a motive more complicated than "must eat" or "must kill" has some ideological (or genetically-engineered) disdain of everyone else or some futile set of grudges. Within the traditional context of the trope, the best fit would be the snooty, highly cultured Eldar and their shiny weapons and hyper-advanced Hover Tanks vs. the boisterous, crude Orks and their gritty guns and smoke-belching trucks and looted tanks.

Emotions vs. Stoicism: The Chaos Gods embody various emotions and are fed by the emotions of the living. Their associated armies (the Chaos Space Marines and Daemons of Chaos) are both divided up by their allegiance to a specific god and the emotions associated with each. By contrast, the Necrons have no emotions at all, on the whole at least, since they are robots without souls. Conflicts between Chaos and Necrons tend to contrast one with the other. Similarly, Eldar only feel any kind of emotion in extremes, so the Craftworld Eldar make sure to train their warriors to be The Stoic as standard practice while the Dark Eldar embrace all their emotions and revel in the feelings their lifestyle brings them.

Flesh Versus Steel: The Imperium relies on mass-produced vehicles and weapons, non-disfiguring biological implants, and sheer stubbornness to face mutated Chaos monstrosities and the Tyranid swarm. The Eldar use some psychic powers and a lot of hyper-advanced technology for everything, while the Dark Eldar are vat-grown and have a fondness for growing strange monsters and grafting bits onto themselves. The Necrons and the Daemons of Chaos wage war on each other regularly, intending to destroy each other. This is good, and bad, because if Chaos is destroyed, our universe and the Warp will not become one, but the Necrons will exterminate everything in the galaxy that isn't them. If Chaos wins, the Necrons are no longer a threat but the Chaos Gods' plans continue.

Magic Versus Science: The battle against the Warp and Chaos (which is for all intents and purposes the "magic" of the setting) is one of the most central plot points. Faith is also used, but ridiculously large caliber guns and energy weapons also help. Of course Chaos can and does corrupt technology by stuffing daemons into it. There's all sorts of scientists fallen to Chaos too since new ideas generally open someone up to the influence of the Warp and who wouldn't be slightly curious to see how it all works? The most known faction of those is the Dark Mechanicus who use more forbidden technologies like artificial intelligence and bio-tech to make very powerful potent weapons. The idea also comes to light when one considers the Tau, who stick entirely to technology and do their best to ignore the presence of sorcery and faith as active forces in the galaxy. The result, among other things, is that their ships move at a snail's pace compared to everyone else, since powerful sorcery is necessary to travel through the Warp. The Necrons don't have any psykers because none of them have any souls. They have Anti-Magic technology instead, and were responsible for creating a rare genetic defect in humans which causes them to be born without souls, making them cause intense pain for nearby psykers and allowing the Necrons to convert them into prototype Necron soldiers; the 5th edition retconned away their involvement with this gene, but it still exists in the fluff. Those born with it are known as "psychic blanks".

Eldar Wraithguards and Wraithlords. They are both robots that are controlled via souls of dead Eldar.

Many Chaos vehicles (and other technology) can be subject to Demonic Possession in lieu of an actual pilot.

The Adeptus Mechanicus believes that every piece of technology has a "Machine Spirit" that needs to be appeased in order for it to work. Appeasement consists of complex religious rituals. Whether the Machine Spirits are real and the rituals actually work, or are simply ancient A.I.'s and maintenance procedures, respectively, is kept rather ambiguous.

The entire gimmick of the Necrons and their "We'll Be Back" special rule, C'tan shards with their Necrodermis "skin", and certain Tyranid monstrous creatures.

In terms of universal rules, this is represented in two ways; really efficient combat medics or regenerative creatures have "feel no pain" to either represent them shrugging off an otherwise fatal wound or rapidly regenerating said wound. The more rarely seen "It Will Not Die" is a more straight application of this trope, giving the model a 1/3rd of a chance to heal one wound every turn. The reason It Will Not Die is much rarer than Feel No Pain is because a lot of the models are One-Hit-Point Wonder and due to the way It Will Not Die works (i.e: the model has to survive the wound), it can only be applied to particularly huge monsters.

The natives of Fenris believe that the Sky Warriors will come down to young warriors on the brink of death and bring them back to their heavenly domains to feast and fight for all eternity. In fact, the Space Wolves monitor the constant battles waged by the natives and use them to select candidates for Space Marine training and transformation.

Many inhabitants of backwater planets who witness the Space Marines (also known as the God-Emperor's Angels of Death) descend to save the planet assume they are gods. Local authority rarely sees any need to disabuse them of the notion (and depending on the level of isolation, it's possible only the government is aware that there is an Imperium to belong to).

The very existence of the Grey Knights chapter is kept secret from the rest of the Imperium. If circumstances dictate that they must fight alongside other Imperial forces, then the secret is maintained after the fighting is over with executions or when the soldiers in question are valuable enough to be allowed to live (such as in the case of other Space Marines) with Laser-Guided Amnesia.

The Inquisition regularly executes anyone who might have come into contact with Daemons or the Ruinous powers due to potential corruption, especially psykers who delve too deep into forbidden lore. However what constitutes "contact" can range from either physically touching a tainted artifact, to being on the same planet as said artifact, depending on the Inquisitor at hand.

The Dark Angels are highly paranoid about anyone knowing about the Fallen. For members of the Chapter, they do give one moment of reprieve, where the Chapter's Inner Circle gather to deem whether or not the member is mentally capable of accepting the new "truth". This is why the Death Wing (the highest non-command rank a Dark Angel can achieve) is so bloated with recruits; a lot of them weren't promoted due to combat skill, but because someone spilled the beans within hearing distance. If deemed unworthy though, either a quick painless death or lobotomy is ordered. As for non-Dark Angels who get wind of this...Let's just say the Inquisition often treats it's guilty better than the Dark Angels.

Hellfire: Naturally, Chaos can produce this. Only it's called Warpfire.

Both played straight and inverted — Villainous Willpower determines which of the two possible One-Winged Angel routes a follower of Chaos goes down, mutating into either a mindless Chaos Spawn, or a Physical God.

The Eternal Warrior rule often denotes a character with unusually high Heroic Willpower that they can tank wounds that should have obliterated a lesser man. The name has caused no small amount of fridge logic, as many big Daemons (who are literally eternal) or other ancient warriors (like the Swarm Lord) do not have this rule while various mortals (including normal humans like Yarrick) have it.

Heroic Sacrifice: Generally how the nice people in 40K die if it's on their own terms. To quote von Remus from Damnatus: In this universe, one is either sacrificed, or sacrifices themself.

He Who Fights Monsters: Happens shockingly often. One example of this: there are two kinds of Inquisitors in the Imperium; Puritans, and Radicals (no, not that kind of radical) and they both have different beliefs on how to fight Chaos. Puritans believe that daemons must only be destroyed, never consorted with or used, in fact they're willing to destroy a bolter touched by a daemon because it is considered corrupted, but by contrast, Radicals believe that the best way to fight daemons is to basically use daemons against them, and this is fine as long as the purpose is pure. The Inquisition is split down the middle, but there's only one truth; Inquisitors usually begin as Puritans and die as Radicals. This is because they start out as Wide Eyed Idealists, but after years of calling Exterminatus, expending thousands or even millions of lives and fighting losing battles with the ruinous powers, they eventually see no hope in the tactics they use and begin using tainted powers and weapons against their monstrous foes in the faint, desperate hope of finally beating them, only to be executed themselves for heresy by a Puritan, who will eventually go on and do the same thing years down the line. Grimdark.

Really, you can apply this to the whole of the Imperium. It helps that in some cases, they are fighting actual monsters.

Highly Conspicuous Uniform: Almost everyone save certain Imperial Guard outfits. Space Marines in particular have the saying "camouflage is the color of cowardice." Then again, being an obvious target is not particularly problematic for a human tank...

History Repeats: The planet of Ullanor was, first, the site of the Ullanor Crusade, a climactic battle between the newborn Imperium and the greatest Ork empire the galaxy had ever seen. Almost a thousand years later, it's once again witness to the climactic battles of The Beast War, which features a resurgent Ork empire, after which the location of this legendary system is ultimately lost the Imperium. It was actually renamed Armageddon, and has since been the site of three more immense wars, including two more against yet another Ork empire. In an astonishingly appropriate turn, the leader of this new empire, Ghazkull Mag Uruk Thraka, is practically named after the battlecry of The Beast, "I am Slaughter", as that phrase translates to "Mag Uruk Thraka" in Orkish.

Historical Villain Upgrade: Doombreed is among the oldest of Khorne's Champions, having been elevated to Daemon Princehood even before the Emperor first manifested himself as the Master of Mankind, and is heavily implied to have been Genghis Khan in life. His exploits in 40K include wiping out two entire chapters of Space Marines.

The Norn-Queens especially, which fill the role of the classic, Mook-spawningbee queen analogue in the Tyranid hive fleets for the most part.

Hobbits: Seldom seen, but present as specialist snipers in the Imperial Guard. In keeping with the grimdark theme, they're called Ratlings and care only about eating, boozing, stealing and fornicating.

The Emperor is portrayed as one as well; in one story he goes to the last church on Terra with the express purpose of destroying it, but not before he's broken the faith of the priest living inside and offered him a chance to join the new Imperium, which ends up with the Priest at the last moment realizing how hypocritical the Emperor's argument was and telling him to his face how he'll just end up becoming the very thing he hates, before going back inside the burning church.

Hollywood Tactics: Generally averted by most races, barring the odd Imperial Guard regiment. Both thoroughly embraced and thoroughly subverted by the Orks, who actually make it work. Played straight in some comics and game cutscenes, though.

Second Edition Lord Commander Solar Macharius had the rather unique ability as your army's leader and a tactical genius to totally screw up your battle plan on the basis of a dice roll; just having him in your army might potentially lead to all your reserve units being committed immediately and skipping the devastating Preliminary Barrage step that was one of the IG army gimmicks (every artillery weapon in your army could fire before the battle actually started). Um, thanks there, mister tactical genius.

While Hollywood Tactics are typically averted both in written fluff and in the game itself (again barring Orks,) it is quite commonly depicted in artwork made for the game. A very common theme is to show two opposing armies of huge size standing in lines and firing at each other from practically point blank range with no cover and no room to move laterally. It looks very dramatic, but such battlefield situations almost never occur in a narrative, and will only occasionally happen on the tabletop.

Holographic Terminal: Used extensively by the Imperium, although they require a solid punch to work at times. They're manipulated with special "wands", with something like touchscreens or keyboards to back it up.

Holy Hand Grenade: The Grey Knights have an array of weapons specifically for battling the daemonic spawn of Chaos. The Black Templars have the actual Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

Homage: Tons and tons of 'em: some are minor, like planets named after games developers or deodorants, while some much more prominent. The best example of a major homage would be the Necrons, who started as an homage to the Terminator films: mysterious robotic skeletons who carried on trying to kill you even if reduced to crawling torsos with no legs, and a special rule called "I'll Be Back". Later changes departed from this, focusing more on their image as impossibly ancient servants of even more impossibly ancient monsters. Essentially now a bunch of Ancient EvilDeterminators with rather too much scalpel imagery, they maintain the robo-skeleton and "We'll Be Back" rule. Eventually, "We'll Be Back" was re-dubbed "resurrection protocols" and their fluff moved them further away from the simple Terminator Expies they once were.

In what may be a twisted homage to the original Terminator's flesh gradually getting messed up to reveal the robotic endoskeleton (as well as a reference to the Aztec deity Xipe Totec), Necron Flayed Ones invert this: they start as machines that then drape themselves in the flayed corpses of their victims.

Home Guard: The Planetary Defense Forces, considered as under-equipped and far less competent by the Imperial Guard. Repeat, the Imperial Guard, Butt-MonkeyCannon Fodder extraordinaire, believes the PDF to be beneath them.

Which, given their status as "Imperial speedbump" (the ones who slow down the enemy until the Guard is there), might have a grain of truth. If anything, they lack a quality the Guard has: Quantity.

Tzeench, being a living embodiment of hope (among many other, far nastier things) is quite fond of inflicting these on both his foes and followers alike. A fantastically cruel example of this is Ahzek Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, who desperately seeks to acquire the knowledge to undo the Rubric of Ahriman, restore the thousands of his brothers who he reduced to ash, and even free his legion from Tzeench's control. He successfully restored a single one of his followers, though unbeknownst to him, Tzeench allowed this solely to delude Ahriman into thinking his quest could possibly succeed.

Horny Devils: Slaaneshi Daemons and Dark Eldar. The latter even have elite troops called Incubi and Succubi.

Horny Vikings: Space Wolves are Vikings IN SPACE, though they don't wear horned helmets— those are reserved for Chaos Marines (and members of the Wolves' 13th Company, who have been in the Warp for 10,000 years and occasionally had to scavenge gear from dead Chaos Marines).

Horse of a Different Color: Mutant horses, cyber-horses, cyber-boars, giant lizards, daemons that look like slugs, daemons that look like metal rhinos...

Hostile Terraforming: "Tyrantforming" is the first stage of devouring a planet by the Tyranids— the spores dropped onto the surface merge with local plantlife, turning it into a Hungry Jungle and rapidly draining the ground of all nutrients. The Tyranids then devour the plants.

Humanity Is Young: Played straight though on somewhat greater timescales than is usual. The Imperium of Man may well be ten thousand years old, and humanity may well have had interstellar travel for the last 37,000 years, yet the Eldar, Orks and Necrons are many times older still. However, the situation is reversed with the Tau, who were primitive hunter-gatherers just 6,000 years ago; in fact they would have been wiped out by the Imperium if a freak warp storm hadn't destroyed the colonization fleet. Culturally, the Tau embody a kind of naive youthful optimism normally associated with humanity in more optimistic science fiction settings — their society is bright, hopeful, scientifically-minded and technologically advanced, compared to the stagnant, superstitious and highly xenophobic Imperium of Man that dominates the galaxy.

Humanoid Aliens: Pretty much every main race except for the Tyranids. Lampshaded in Xenology.

Human Sacrifice: The Golden Throne is fed, daily, the souls of one thousand psykers who weren't powerful enough to be put to use by the Imperium. Chaos rituals frequently make use of this also.

Humans Are Bastards: Although it has been established that the Imperium has to be terrible in order to survive, it can be hard to figure out how far this justification extends, particularly due to the corruption and incompetence that riddle its governing bodies.

Humans Are Divided: Humanity is ostensibly united under the Imperium, but it is constantly plagued by rebellions, both Chaos and otherwise.

Humans Are Morons: The Imperium of Man has hardly advanced their technology in the 10,000 years since anyone has last seen The Emperor Of Mankind. Human culture throughout their vast empire is extremely paranoid and superstitious, and the government is such a vast, inept bureaucracy that a simple filing error can lead to entire populations of people being immediately forgotten about and/or destroyed.

Largely Averted. Traits other settings give to humans to make them special — optimism, curiosity, adapting technology, social savvy — are given to the Tau. What humans have going for them is the fact that they're heavily entrenched throughout the galaxy, have bigger and outright better military sector than most, they outnumber everyone else apart from the Orks and Tyranids, and that they're willing to cross any moral line or sacrifice anyone if it means winning.

This is all largely thanks to the Emperor and his most able servants. The downside is that the Imperium as it is, is mostly coasting off of his successes, and it's all largely degenerated into a corrupted, debased version of his ideals. If he weren't interred in the Golden Throne, we might have seen a wiser, more restrained, and better-organized humanity than exists in the Imperium's present.

They are, however, quite special in two horrifying ways. The first is they are practically the ideal mortal servant race of the Chaos Gods, and as such are constantly under threat of falling to the dark powers and being wiped out by those who seek to defeat the Forces of Chaos. The second is the phenomenon of Blanks, which are beings born without souls that work as living dead zones in the warp, is exclusive to Humanity.

The Space Marines of the Salamanders chapter are black note Literally, their skin has the color and texture of coal. in official art, and the White Scars are distinctly Asian. (We have the distinctly shh-we're-not-Arabs Tallarns too.) The fluff states the Tau have different skin colours, although all are variants on blue/grey.

Also, one of Inquisitor Vail's footnotes in Caves of Ice indicates that while black people are decidedly rare on Valhalla, there are several nearby planets where pretty damn near everyone is black. Of course, there are still about 100 billion times more white people in the Imperium.

The Celestial Lions Chapter, who have recently received some focus in the fluff, are not only distinctly African in culture, but are also noted as being rather dark skinned.

Also a good few modern Imperial Guard armies have black soldiers, especially the Catachans. It's how the gamer paints his stuff really.

In the tie-in video game Dawn of War, Inquisitor Toth is black, as is Librarian Jonah Orion in Dawn of War II and III.

The Emperor himself is said to have been born in central Anatolia and is usually depicted as quite tan.

There is some theoretical justification for this trope: Imperial policy holds that people with disfiguring mutations are heretical scum just for existing. Thus, it's likely that wild variations in stuff like skin tone isn't exactly seen as desirable for some particularly zealous places.

While it'd be heresy to call them "alien", Space Marines definitely count. They look like oversized humans, but the process that turns them into One Man Armies is much more interesting on the inside. Their bone structure is remade - among others, their ribs are fused together into a biological "plate" - and they're given third lung (which can breathe in water and oxygen-low environments), a super-kidney and second heart. They also get a membrane that lets them enter suspended animation, an organ that extracts memories from food, gland that lets them spit acid, superhuman enhancements to senses and light armour growing under their skin, which lets them interact with their Power Armour. Not to mention the progenoids, which are located in the neck and which are the most important of all "extras", as they can grow all those other organs, making them essential to continued existence of Space Marines.

The Eldar, while looking like tall humans with almond eyes and pointy ears, are also different on the inside. Their skeleton is more plastic and bending, their muscles stronger compared to human ones, their teeth are actually parts of jawbone (like with some birds), and their pregnancies can last several years. There's also the fact that while human psykers appear to age quicker from using their powers, eldar ones start to crystallize instead.

Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Warp, or Immaterium, is a reflection of the emotions of all sentient beings, the collective Dream Land of the galaxy and home to all the nightmares there have ever been, given form. Part Spirit World, part Phantom Zone, a sea of emotion and the source of all psychic power, it's also the daemon-infested home of the Chaos Gods and is, for all intents and purposes, hell. And going through it is the only faster-than-light travel available to most races. A significant issue with travel through the Warp is the fact that unless your ship has a functional Gellar Field isolating a bubble of reality around the ship, you and the rest of the crew WILL be consumed by every nasty thing that's out there, in suitably non-euclidean ways. THEN there's the issue of time not moving consistently or in the right direction, so even if you reach your destination you might not get there when you wanted.

There are a few routes through the Warp that are both well known and well traveled enough that fleets using them have a reasonably accurate expectation of both reaching their destination and even when they'll arrive. Trying to go somewhere off the beaten path is both more difficult, slower, and more prone to the temporal vagarities associated with long-distance travel.

The Webway is this mixed with Portal Network. is a labyrinthine set of wormhole highways that bypass the warp entirely, accessed via webway gates. It used to cover most, if not all of the galaxy, but has since shrunken by a few thousand years of disrepair and the whole Fall of the Eldar thing. Webway gates range in size from a typical garage door to monumental structures large enough to drive a spaceship through. Originally only the Eldar and the Dark Eldar had access to the Webway, having inherited it from the Old Ones, but the Necrons managed to hijack sections for their own use. Rumor has it that the Emperor of Mankind was working on getting access and bypassing the whole "needing to fly a ship through hell to get anywhere" but the Horus Heresy put the kibosh on that project.

Hypocrite: The Imperium. Big time. Their culture is obsessed with keeping the purity of the human form, and so is hugely supremacist against mutants. However the Adeptus Astartes, their finest warriors and their strongest line of defence against their inhuman opponents, are so heavily augmented with cybernetic and genetic modification (so they are able to take them on one-on-one) that they certainly don't qualify as anything remotely human any more. The Imperium also persecutes psykers despite the fact that a) the whole Imperium would undeniably collapse without them, as their FTL travel relies on their powers, and b) the God-Emperor who founded the Imperium and whom they now worship as a god was/is one, the most powerful one in the galaxy, bar none to boot.

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